Tracy Weisman presents: Body/Image

September 10- October 11, 2022

My work originates from emotions and memories that are strong enough to feel in my body. Keeping things bottled up inside is mentally toxic to me, so I release that energy into the physical world via powerful visual metaphors.

I employ any materials that help tell my stories. I’m drawn to the past lives of found objects and instinctively collect things without knowing why. Using quotidian objects in unexpected ways gives me a jolt of excitement and ensures my practice never becomes boring.

The ego would have us believe our feelings are unique, a potentially lonely and dangerous thing. The vulnerability in my work is a deliberate gesture of love that aims to disprove that falsehood and encourage human connection: We must each walk our own path, but we don’t have to do it alone.

Untitled

Plastic doll hands, twill tape, marine zipper

$3,000

Every Other Hour

Quilt

$800

Gun violence in America is a public health crisis. Inspired by a Chicago Public Radio series of the same title, this piece contains images of 4,331 bullets...one for each person shot in Chicago in 2016...one human body violated every other hour.

I Fro Up

Quilt

NFS

Young children are petri dishes who generously share every illness with their parents. During one particularly bad winter, my kids were sick for three months straight and my body felt under attack physically and emotionally. Decades later, I still remember the pediatrician’s telephone number.

Mommy, Mommy

Dress and apron

NFS

As any mother learns, your body ceases to be your own after you give birth. Nursing, cuddling, bathing and changing your babies temporarily dissolves the boundary between mother and child. This transformation is tender and necessary and loving…and occasionally suffocating. Mommy, Mommy was created when my sons were 6 and 2 to express both the bliss of attachment to my children and my desperate need for bodily autonomy.

Girl Talk

I spent a good part of my teenage years in a bikini on the beach in Narragansett, RI, my changing body on full display along with those of my peers. At home, I absorbed some unhealthy messages about how women’s bodies ought to look, and of course, experienced idealized, airbrushed female bodies in the media.

Unsurprisingly (and despite always being a healthy weight for my height) I developed a harshly critical inner voice about my appearance that continued into adulthood. This voice was relentlessly judgmental and downright cruel. It took on an even nastier tone after my body twice experienced the miracle of pregnancy and childbirth. Until one day, fed up with hating my mirror, I asked myself:

“You would never say these things to a sweet baby girl. So why on earth are you saying them to yourself? Girl Talk is this 60-year-old, soon-to-be-grandmother’s attempt to exorcise my body image demons. By putting my self-cruelty on display I’ve been able to realize the absurdity of treating myself so unkindly.