http://WWW.BODYBUILDERANDSPORTSMAN.COM
BODYBUILDER & SPORTSMAN GALLERY solo exhibition by New York based artist Tracy Nakayama. Nakayama's new ink-wash drawings on paper continue her heterosexual female perspective towards sexuality.
Much like the previous work created by Tracy Nakayama, these new works reference the 1970's sex films she obsessively collects from different cultural sources. Transforming the glossy hard-edge soft-core porn to delicate line and warm color washes, these scenes move from being one kind of turn-on to another. With Nakayama's work there is an instant frisson coupled with a moral imperative that is then beautifully suffused by the tenderness of the description.
Many images describe straight-on sexual encounters while others such as The Conversation, a larger drawing, reveal a rather banal scene with numerous characters who casually loll about, comfortable in their nudity even as it impacts upon our viewing discomfort. In a smaller drawing, Pink Comforter, Nakayama exposes two lovers caught in a very private, yet comfortably familiar sexual embrace. The woman, her leg thrown over her lover, appears lost in a deliriously luscious moment, consumed by her thought whereas her lover is unmistakably sad at her psychological distance. Nakayama's artwork references the private and social innuendos of sex as complicated and nuanced negotiations with contemporary morals and aesthetics.
Born in Hawaii in 1974, Tracy Nakayama, received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and currently lives in Brooklyn. Her work has been shown recently at Acuna-Hansen Gallery in Los Angeles; Gallery Lisa Ruyter, Vienna; Hiromi Yoshii, Tokyo, Japan; New York, P.S.1 MoMA, New York; Nakayama can be seen currently in "Erotic Drawings" a traveling exhibit from Diverse Works, Houston, and the Aldrich Museum in CT.
New Piece by TRACY NAKAYAMA
"God Only Knows"
More Commentary on Tracy from prior show.
The 1970s bestseller by Dr. Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex had a reputation as being the closest thing to a hippie bible that there was. New York artist Tracy Nakayama’s watercolor scenes are reminiscent of the book’s close-up pages of beards performing cunnilingus and penises being cuddled into the bosoms of shapely earth mom-mas. But Nakayama’s images remind us that this book of step by step stoner communion ended up more likely to be found under the beds of middle class parents than it was next to a commune’s supply of macramé. Like the girl named Rainbow who was often asked if her parents were hippies, “They thought they were.” There is a contextual irony in seeing other people from different periods of time doing the nasty; we feel superior, quite contemporary in contrast to them. And we, the gallery viewers, are not currently naked.
Nakayama’s wet lines of a seventies rust tone add an irony in line with her generation: If you are old enough to remember sex in the 1970s, you are old enough to be the parents of today’s art stars. Like us all, the thoughtof mom and dad making love alter-nates between queasy and funny. When it is well painted in simple monochrome line, the act--no matter who is involved--becomes validated as a timeless cultural relic under Nakayama’s talented hand and sharp, ironic eye.
DAN DOE
"SUSANNAH & THE ELDERS"
