Tessa MacKay (b. 1991) is an artist based in Walyalup/Fremantle, Western Australia.

As a painter specialising in photo/hyperrealism, styles reliant on photography, MacKay’s artistic practice has evolved to examine her inclination to select ‘high-value’ source imagery, which justifies the extensive hours required to render such detail. In response to this metric of labour and its often homogenised aesthetic, MacKay now integrates formalist elements from Classical Realism, 17th-century Dutch Golden Age painters, and 18th-century Neo Impressionists to depict ‘low-value’ digital source imagery.

In doing so, MacKay’s work investigates the evolving role of painters amidst the proliferation of image-making and sharing technologies, and their influence on societal perceptions of value in images. In her latest body of work, MacKay transposes a series of mid-to-late 2000s lo-fi digital Facebook photographs, resulting in a compelled re-contextualisation of figurative painting techniques and materiality.