Her work engages with themes of economic and social upheaval in interwar China, the role of women in Arabic society and Māori in relation to colonisation in New Zealand.
[3] Eventually, the figure became important in Straka's practice and she began to use photographs as the starting point for some of her works and "Increasingly too the body feminine has become her milieu".
[1] Her series of paintings appropriating portraits of Māori chiefs by artists such as Charles Goldie, Gottfried Lindauer and colonial photographer, W.H.T.
Straka copied these paintings with her trade mark polished and detailed style but added new elements such as red tinged skin, tattoos, horns and halos.
In this exhibition, Straka developed large format photographs that reference the Japanese concept of the ero kawaii which Andrew Paul Wood has described as “that disturbingly pedophilic hybrid of Sanryo kitschy Hello Kitty cuteness and kinderwhore Lolita coquettishness”.
The exhibition consisted of a wall of individual portraits of young female Japanese, Chinese and Korean models and a tableau vivant of the same girls gathered around a blond corpse on a gurney.