TRACY HANNA_Things Fall Apart_
SOMA Contemporary_Waterford_
February 3 – February 26_ 2011_
Early on, artists often employ the readymade as a financially cheap but theoretically relevant crutch to prop up their emerging art practice. When the artist does pluck a readymade from the skip of the everyday as part of some artistic gesture, in what seems an infinite post-Duchampian era of art ‘unmaking’, the question of “art for art’s sake” is unavoidably posed. Tracy Hanna’s dismembered 3-legged office table monuments at SOMA Contemporary suggest that her relationship with the readymade is romantically unstable.
Stacked 3 and 4 high, each idiosyncratic table has one leg missing, which are all relocated against a wall as if readied to be photographed for an online auction site for those who have a penchant for furniture prosthesis. A more laborious readymade construct by the artist is a table that hangs from the ceiling with its legs curled up in suspended animation, as if rigor mortis has just set in.
On the surrounding walls are pencil drawings suggestive of household timber waste and readymade scraps. Uninteresting in themselves, these obligatory penciled pre/post-afterthoughts are accompanied by two photographs of Hanna getting in on her own act, by framing herself within precarious partnerships with a chair in one instance, and a skylight that looks down upon an empty domestic interior in another.
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MARCH_2011_
Readymade Re-animator
TRACY HANNA_Things Fall Apart_SOMA Contemporary_Waterford_
February 3 - February 26_ 2011_
