About
Tracy Murrell is an Atlanta-based artist and curator. Her artwork explores the use of silhouettes, recontextualizing the images to use as entry points for deeper conversations on gender, race, ethnicity, oppression, privilege, and beauty. Using photographs, her process begins by reducing her subjects to their essential elements, eliminating everything until they are stripped to raw imagery of line to expose their most compelling details. Painted in high key color, her paintings are reminiscent of Pop and post-pop Masters such as Lichtenstein, Katz and Hume, prompting the viewer to question their own beliefs about race and gender, as well as what is high and low art.
Statement
My work is a celebration of the beauty and grace that I see in all women of color. My intent is for the viewer to slow down, take their time, take it all in, and find their connection to the portraits before them. The thread is there ... we are all human beings with rich lives filled with grace. I am drawn to images of the female form; it is the silhouette of women that are of particular interest to me. I see the grace and energy women inhabit in the world, which is so often commodified in popular media. In response to this, I offer counter symbols of women as figures personifying grace and strength. In my work, I explore the use of silhouettes by recontextualizing images from popular culture to use as entry points for deeper conversations on gender, race, and the perceptions of beauty. In the current body of work, I am focusing on the themes of identity, migration, and displacement in the human narrative by incorporating hand cut patterns, encaustic painted papers that I collage with the silhouettes.