Working across video and performance, Wynne Greenwood explores constructions of the self, tracing how subjectivities are formed in public and private spaces and always in relation to others—be they imagined or real-life personae.
Tracy + the Plastics, Can You Pause That for a Second?, 2003/2014 (still). Video, color, sound; 25:11 min. Courtesy Wynne Greenwood
New Museum Theater and Fifth Floor Visit Us
Greenwood is widely known for her work as Tracy + the Plastics, in which she plays all three parts in an all-girl band. As Tracy + the Plastics, Greenwood performed live as vocalist Tracy, accompanied by videos of herself portraying backup singers Nikki and Cola, and toured across the country from 1999 until the project’s end in 2006.
Naming a new, yet-to-be-imagined character orbiting beyond the Plastics’ cosmology, “Kelly” is an exhibition and a six-month residency at the New Museum in which Greenwood will premiere the complete, recently re-performed and newly mastered archive of Tracy + the Plastics’ performances. Bringing this archive into dialogue with more recent work exploring the artist’s interest in what she has called “culture healing,” “Kelly” will consider the poetics of the pause while mining electric gaps of meaning in conversation and offering possibilities for feminist, queer, and other experimental models of collaboration and dialogue. Greenwood’s residency will include a series of readings, panels, and performances that explore the exhibition’s themes of language and music. In conjunction with the exhibition, material from the historic New Museum exhibitions “Homo Video: Where We Are Now” (1986–87) and “Bad Girls” (1994) will be on view in the Museum’s Resource Center.
A comprehensive catalogue, copublished by the Cooley Gallery and the New Museum, and designed by Heather Watkins, will accompany the exhibition. The book contains texts, imagery, ephemera, and performance transcriptions, with contributions by Johanna Burton, Wynne Greenwood, Sara Jaffe, Emily Roysdon, and Stephanie Snyder.
“Kelly” is co-curated by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement at the New Museum, and Stephanie Snyder, John and Anne Hauberg Curator and Director of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, Oregon, with Sara O’Keeffe, Assistant Curator, New Museum. An earlier iteration of this project, “Stacy,” was presented at the Cooley Gallery in the summer and fall of 2014 and was curated by Snyder.
