Tracy Featherstone: "Please Tie Me Down"
Go! FEATURE
A trip to Ghana, West Africa, got Tracy Featherstone to thinking about how tenuous domestic situations can be.
At the time, the Miami University instructor was looking to buy her first home.
While her home-buying experience meant meetings with realtors and mortgage agents, she saw people in Africa going through quite a different set of rituals and processes.
“They would walk around the beach gathering palm fronds,” she said. “The incongruities of doing the same thing in different places at the same time really struck me, and as I thought more about it, the thing that most stuck with me is that our existence is really as ephemeral as the next, but we talk ourselves into thinking that these things are permanent and safe.”
Those contrasting images of domesticity — the African frond home and the custom-built American McMansion — started becoming metaphors for relationships: “The domestication of me,” she said.
Expressing this through her art entailed the construction of “child-like fort environments” for her Weston Gallery exhibition "Please Tie Me Down."
“Childhood fort building exemplifies the need to devise a safe personal space while emphasizing the awkward and inadequate nature of the structure created,” she wrote in her statement. “Standard Western construction elements such as two-by-fours and plywood mingle with less stable elements such as collage and papier-mâché. Industrial materials are reformed to reference their natural states. The unstable relationship between man and man or man and his natural environment is displayed through awkward acts of balance and aggressive intersections throughout the sculptures.”
In “Fall Out,” for instance, living room furniture undergoes transformations to underscore and emphasize their inherent instability.
“Love relationships are a temporary thing,” she said. “Things can go awry.”
“Fall Out” and some of the other installations use a television set as part of the imagery, a comment on the effect that instrument has had on our lives.
“I think television is primarily responsible for breaking down relationships in our society,” she said.
Featherstone received a bachelor of fine arts from the college of DAAP at the University of Cincinnati in 1997 and a master of fine arts from the University of Arizona in 2002. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions presented at Hiestand Gallery at Miami University and other galleries around the country. In 2006, she received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Creativity Award.
Featherstone lives and maintains a studio in Hamilton.
how to go
WHO: “Please Tie Me Down,” installation by Tracy Featherstone.
WHERE: Weston Gallery, Aronoff Center for the Arts, 650 Walnut Ave., Cincinnati.
WHEN: Through March 17.
COST: Donation.
Photo: "Escape Route"
