September 2–October 19, 2014
Opening: September 12, 4–8pm
Reed College
3203 SE Woodstock Blvd.
Portland, Oregon 97202
Free and open to the public
Stacy is curated by Stephanie Snyder and Wynne Greenwood, and is part of the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s 2014 Time-Based Art Festival.
Wynne Greenwood transforms the Cooley Gallery into a studio and performance space in order to re-engage her groundbreaking art band Tracy + the Plastics in relationship to her most recent experimental video, installation, and object-based work. Over the past year Greenwood has re-created each of Tracy’s performances—completing this archival rebirth while in residence at the Cooley. Stacy nurtures Tracy + the Plastics into contact and conversation with its own future, creating a queering space of intimacy, humor, and hope.
Tracy + the Plastics presents an expansive vision of public and private identity in which Greenwood performs live, as Tracy, with her two projected collaborators: Greenwood performing as Nikki (on keyboards) and Cola (on drums). The three women sing, banter, and chat—unfolding their relationship across seductively electric gaps of meaning through music and conversation, and gesture and inaction. In Greenwood’s words: “When an individual in a marginalized group talks to a recorded image of themselves it empowers the individual to open the door to the understanding and celebration that she/he/they can be deliberate.” Similarly, Greenwood’s most recent installations incorporate video and object-based works to create spaces of symbolic encounter.
Stacy‘s world is one of seductively open and tangled inclusiveness, echoing the words of queer theorist Lauren Berlant: “If we understand that everything we do is going to be flawed and awkward and slapstick, we have a better chance at surviving our disappointments on behalf of a political goal. I think it’s the job of writers and critics and artists and everyone to create better objects for better fantasies—which is to say, objects that offer the possibility of less cruel-optimistic relations.” Stacy seeks to dwell beyond the survival of disappointment, even, embracing awkwardness and failure as strategies for imagining, forming, and reaching toward collective personal and political goals.
A full-color book, published at the close of the exhibition, will document Stacy within the wider context of Greenwood’s work, with texts by Snyder, Greenwood, and invited authors, and designed by Heather Watkins, Portland, Oregon. The publication is made possible through the generous support of The New Foundation, Seattle. Loans to the exhibition are made possible courtesy of the Bonnie Bronson Fund, Portland, Oregon, and the artist.
The Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, is an intimate academic museum, nestled in the Reed College library. The Cooley was established by a generous 1988 endowment from Sue and Edward Cooley and John and Betty Gray “in support of the teaching of art history at Reed College, as part of an interdisciplinary educational experience that strengthens the art history component of Reed’s distinctive humanities program.” Exhibitions are curated by director Stephanie Snyder, often in collaboration with Reed faculty and courses across the disciplines, with attention to the needs and interests of the larger Portland and Northwest arts communities. A schedule of three to four exhibitions during the academic year brings to Reed and the Portland community work that would not otherwise be seen in the region. Exhibiting artists include: David Reed ’68, Léonie Guyer, Bruce Nauman, Kara Walker, Lynda Benglis, Sutapa Biswas, Marc Joseph Berg, Fritz Haeg, Gregory Crewdson, Molly Dilworth, Hamidreza Ghelichkhani, Lynne Woods Turner, and Lorna Bieber. The Cooley organizes a K–12 education outreach and teacher-training program, and founded Reed’s new Calligraphy Initiative, which is returning the legacy and study of calligraphy and paleography to Reed College, in honor of Reed College calligraphy professor Lloyd J. Reynolds (1902–1978).
