Tracy Thomason “Symbols, Signs and Signals”

Marinaro

[Image: Tracy Thomason "Shock Treatment" (2017) Oil and marble dust on canvas 20 x 16 in.]

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—education understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs, and signals. –Linda Nochlin

Marinaro presents Tracy Thomason’s first New York solo exhibition, a series of textural paintings built from the slowness and layering of classical painting and sculptural material.

In Thomason’s work, paint and marble dust are hand-mixed into a clay-like material and carefully applied to linen surfaces. Layered in sequence with surgical precision, a mottled rocky ground forms over time, revealing themselves to have more in common with something remembered from the Cave of Forgotten Dreams or a chunk of washed up rubble on the beach.

The artist’s mark fluctuates between the quick stabs of stone carving tools, knife slices, and the gentle insistence of a powdery drawn line. Sculpted abstract glyphs are applied in meditation, snapping the works into graphic clarity from one painting to the next, developing an economy of form as language. These paintings are meant to be read in addition to being felt.

Thomason’s paintings begin to mirror themselves through the doubling of form and imagery. Drawing attention to the relationship between forms and negative space, denser shapes often reference the female body or summon nocturnal landscapes. Where one asserts itself as something of the corporeal, the same form acts as a period at the end of a sentence—a black hole to absorb your gaze. Flat color is a pause for contemplation and remembrance, reminding you where you are located.

Occupying a physical space the scale of a modest bathroom mirror or that of an oversized newspaper unfolded in completion, suggests the importance of looking and how to experience the world around us. In the 1970’s informational text, ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’, women were encouraged to use a hand mirror as an exploratory tool, ‘take a mirror and examine yourself, after all you are your body and you are not obscene.”

Tracy Thomason (b. 1984, Maryland, U.S.) received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Exhibitions include a solo presentation at NADA Projects with Cuevas Tilleard Gallery, NY, NY and a two-person exhibition with Peter Halley at Teen Party, Brooklyn, NY. Select group exhibitions include Asya Geisberg, James Fuentes LLC, and Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York, NY, 106 Green in Brooklyn, NY, Dan Devening Projects in Chicago, IL, and Blyth Gallery, Imperial College London, UK. Thomason lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.