Tracy Nakayama
November 7 - December 19, 2009
Opening reception Saturday, November 7, 6-9pm.
Tracy Nakayama, Hands Beat the Surface, 2009. Ink on paper, 8.5" X 8.5".
From her psycho-sensual ink-drawings depicting couples and trios engaging in hairy love-making one might assume that Tracy Nakayama is obsessed with sex. Of course you'd only be half right. She's actually obsessed with the fleeting freedom the act leaves us with. It's the same reason she's into drawing hippies holding candles and '60s counterculture figures like Anita Pallenberg and Yoko Ono. Like the sex act itself, these anachronistic icons represent an idealized moment in time that couldn't be sustained, but can be frozen briefly in ink on paper.
For this exhibition-her first at Kinkead Contemporary-Nakayama mines deeper than the vintage smut mags she has in the past used as reference. Her newest drawings, though still resplendent in their russet-colored washes, as often as not depict movements other than the erotic. Mimes, tumblers, and interpretative dancers flit across the marbled pages, seemingly oblivious that the times have been 'a changin' around them. In another scene, a trio of nudes sunbathes nonchalantly on modern society's detritus-a junkyard-as sylphish as the scrambling cherubs of Houses of the Holy. Be they blissfully narcoleptic or obscenely acrobatic, what Nakayama's subjects have in common is an uninhibited naturalness, an incognizant I-don't-give-a-fuck that verges on what we'd typically call "zoning out." "I'm interested in the idea of portraying figures in some sort of cathartic state," admits Nakayama, "Like a psychic vacuum."
