Tracy Thomason:
Highlights, Low Fades, and Deep Cuts
August 5 - 28, 2011
PHILADELPHIA- Tiger Strikes Asteroid is pleased to
announce the opening of its August exhibition, Highlights,
Low Fades, and Deep Cuts, a solo exhibition of recent works
by Tracy Thomason.
Thomasonʼs work employs conventional
painting and sculptural materials along with personal
materials and actions – a deconstructed leather glove, hair
gel, temperance, self-tanner, tears, oil, paper clay, and canvas are among the materials in her
studio arsenal. Expertly manipulated, these materials yield work that is wildly tactile, is evocative
of an intersection between aggression and decoration, embodies gendered beauty rituals of
transformation, and highlights a tenuous balance between improvisation and careful
composition.
The showʼs essayist, Melissa Giannini, notes:
Tracy Thomasonʼs work stirs an impulse to touch, try on, wrap oneself up inside the history of
her chosen (often donated and/or recycled) materials, evoking sunny afternoons spent rifling
through a rack of threadbare jeans and faded leather jackets at a thrift store, a faint pencil mark
waiting to be brushed away like a stray hair off a loverʼs shoulder. Actual hair drapes from
abstract canvases like a lowered false eyelash or Amish-style beard. A chunk of alabaster glows
with the embarrassed blush of expertly applied rouge. Splotches of hair gel blot a stretched
canvas like sex. A felted and dyed yoga mat is infused with a sense of abandoned (or
repurposed) idealism. Simply put, her pieces speak for themselves.
About the artist:
Tracy Thomason was born in Gaithersburg, Maryland and currently lives and works in Brooklyn,
New York. She has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad, recently with James Fuentes
Gallery in New York, NY, Nudashank in Baltimore, MD, and Second Home Projects in Berlin.
She received her MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in 2008 and her
BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 2006. She has given lectures at
Cranbrook Academy of Art and the University of Knoxville, TN. Tracy is a fourth generation
female artist.
Tracy Thomason: Highlights, Low Fades, and Deep Cuts
August 5-28, 2011
Opening Reception: Friday, August 5, 2011, 6pm-10pm
Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 2pm-6pm and by appointment
--
Tiger Strikes Asteroid
319A North 11th Street, 2nd Floor, Suite 2H
Philadelphia PA 19107
Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 2pm-6pm and by appointment
http://www.
