Tracy Thomason “White Rabbit”

Marinaro

This event has ended.

Marinaro is pleased to present Tracy Thomason’s second solo show with the gallery, White Rabbit, an exhibition of new paintings.

The works in the exhibition are influenced by a painting that hung over Thomason’s bed as a child, a work by her grandmother of Alice in Wonderland in a landscape setting titled White Rabbit. Thomason’s grandmother painted the work in 1967 in response to the Jefferson Airplane song of the same name. Painting during the Covid-19 pandemic, Thomason used this childhood memory as a starting point for inspiration and escapism to a period of light hearted feelings, freedom, and happy memories with her grandmother before delving deeper into the other connotations around the story.

Drawing from the themes of Alice’s world as depicted by songwriter Grace Slick in 1965 she explained that the white rabbit is about following your curiosity, part of which, for Slick, included drugs for mind expansion and social experimentation. Here, Thomason funnels mind expansion into her representations on the canvas. The intention being, when the senses and cognition are challenged, so is the status quo. Thomason explores personal inquiry through psychedelic imagery and abstraction. Thomason’s work is tactile and immediately conveys a physicality that includes touch and optical color based reflections.

The current time period parallels many of the social changes and protests in the 1960s and Thomason abstracts concrete imagery alluding to transformation and connecting with the past to understand the present. Looking closer at the works, objects begin to appear. A fist raised in protest is drawn next to the shape of an ear and mouth form, an allusion to the words that need to be heard. An interrobang symbol, intended to combine the functions of the question mark and exclamation mark, alludes to emphatic, passionate inquiry that is needed during the current government administration. Telephones, lungs, flames, vessels, landscapes and bodies are visible as a viewer looks closer at each work.

Thomason’s bright and complex palettes of color and intricate technique of oil and marble dust applied to linen are joyful compositions that give the viewer an escapism while also holding important meaning for this moment in time.

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 Over
the Influence, Los Angeles; 56 Henry, Asya Geisberg, James Fuentes LLC, and Jeff Bailey
Gallery in New York, NY, 106 Green in Brooklyn, NY, and Andrehn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, SE.
Thomason lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.