Tracy Nakayama
- Artist Statement
- Curator Statement
- zingmagazine project
- Website
Artist Statement
My new work continues to explore the practice of human sexuality by referencing pornography, film, and music. This sexual engagement transforms the glossy, iconic softcore to beautiful, delicate drawings and warm washes of color. I never intended to capture the nostalgia of the ’70s. I am however, a big collector of porn magazines. I’m mainly interested in the ephemeral quality of them, considering that most porn exists on DVD and the internet. The images don’t necessarily come from that particular genre, but come from the ’60s, all the way to the early ’80s and sometimes include friends, lovers, and acquaintances. Because my subject matter deals with female sexuality, people always want to sensationalize the work. I spend a lot of time editing images, trying to turn the finished drawing into something that captures a specific moment that’s meaningful on many different levels.
Curator Statement
Tracy Nakayama’s “Art for the Practicing Heterosexual” first appeared in zingmagazine 12, and literally readdressed the idea of sexuality through the use of pornography as a continual subject for art. While certainly aware of male predecessors such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Larry Clark, and Richard Kern, her work takes on a decidedly feminine point of view/Feminine Gaze. Her imagery is culled from her library of pornographic magazines dating from the ’60s and ’80s, and a cast of people from her personal life. Typically executed in ink on paper within the sepia range, the work in the Dikeou Collection comes from several different years or evolutions. Many of the works coyly poke fun at different sexual fantasies, poses, games, and practices using a wide range of supplemental tools from footballs, nets, steamer trunks, horses, to classical sculpture. Others reveal different cultural indulgences/fashion practices from tattoos, ’70s graphics and sayings, to the act of sharing Cutty Sark, while still others simply revel in both anticipation of climax and post-coital morning after bathing. By taking the banal and the grand, the exciting and the monotonous, the manufactured and exoticized, the artist edits, manipulates, and re-models found scenarios to create a new feminine personal topography of sometimes soft, sometimes hard pornographically charged sexuality , bringing them to challenging new frontiers.
