Tracy Thomason “The Pollinator”

Tracy Thomason “The Pollinator”

Marinaro

This event has ended.

Marinaro presents The Pollinator, Tracy Thomason’s fourth exhibition with the gallery, inhabiting both spaces.

This exhibition continues Thomason’s ongoing investigation into painting as a layered object— a site for exploration and a physical manifestation of the body and the map, and painting as the object that carries them. In Ursula Le Guin’s seminal essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, she writes:

“Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.” [1]

Thomason ascribes these same ideals to painting, where the unexplainable can be made tangible in ways that go beyond language. She is weaving a textured unending story, one that is buttressed by the artist’s signature crushed marble surfaces, scale, and color. Thomason’s color system is driven by elemental affect; color is heat. In this body of work, she introduces mottled silver grounds to enlist a physical cool to the system while also being their own active shimmering light sources. Here silver situates itself as an alien neutral, closing the gap between lunar and earthly conjuring.

Wombs, tombs, bellies, and sacks find their way into the forms of the paintings in this exhibition— a cross-pollination of image and ideas across every surface where abstraction is the mode of communication between anatomical, floral, and biomechanical patterns. Thomason likens her process to that of the wild bee, an organic printer touching every substrate and leaving behind building blocks of matter to become something greater. The slow stitch of paint application lends itself to careful recording and speculation on the connection of forms. Here, they are all modes of (re)production and replication that extend themselves beyond and outside the body. These paintings chart a history of movements— the tangled interconnectedness of our interactions between ourselves, others, the world at large, and perhaps, worlds beyond.

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 Marinaro (2022, 2020, 2017), NADA Projects with Cuevas Tilleard Projects, NY, NY and a two-person exhibition with Peter Halley at Teen Party, Brooklyn, NY. Select group exhibitions include Analog Diary, Beacon, NY; Over the Influence, Los Angeles; 56 Henry, Asya Geisberg, James Fuentes, 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.
[1] Le Guin, Ursula, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. 1989

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1. Le Guin, Ursula, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. 1989

Media

• Painting

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