Tracy Murinik : On show in Cape Town
A note on the door advises that ”It is about truth and reconciliation”, while simultaneously warning against sensitive visual material and reminding one to respect the fact that one is entering a home. Hush … Hush, ”a love story”, begins on the stairwell that leads up to the artist’s studio and living space, progressing through a burnt archway up to the door.
Entering the space feels invasive. Tracy Payne’s installation inhabits almost her entire studio flat. It is a space densely littered with things, personal and found artefacts, walls covered with magazine pages, photographs and graffiti. This is both shrine and severely tortured mindscape, ambivalently punishing and nurturing the person which it possesses and/or threaten to dispossess.
It reads like an exorcism of nightmare and phantasm from the point of view of a highly traumatised personal history. It is at once a reclamation of innocence lost, stolen and betrayed, and a repossession and remembrance of Payne’s own sexuality. As a viewer, one is implicated in a difficult and uneasy voyeuristic play, a witness able to access this personal journey of rediscovery and redefinition.
Hush … Hush is formulated as an exposition of repressed and dangerous memory by three voices, namely those of Payne and her two alter egos, polly and didi. Payne describes the installation as ”a big adult playroom” in which these three quite different personae are able to explore and distill their memories into clarity and safety. Each voice has a different capacity to break an imposed silence and reveal an aspect of herself.
polly, she explains, allows her to play with pornography, is a bit of a ”rave babe” and a pyromaniac. Tracy is the hardcore painter and photo-realist, and Didi is an asexual graffiti artist who longs to revert to innocence and know herself as innocent. The play is about reformimg a sense of self which is capable of rejecting the assumed identities of self-hatred and shame that abuse tends to foster.
Much of the work has been burnt in what seems to be a process of almost ritual cleansing. It is a process of sanctifying the profane, for example, ”kiss it better” scrawled below images of sprawled genitalia entitled Pussy Galore.
The artist revises herself in many sexual guises, and remembers herself at various ages. The complex interaction of elements which make up the installation often seem quite crass and almost corny. But this is also what makes these works particularly powerful.
She attempts to reconcile the voice of a child with adult sexual interventions. The references and associations are often quite simple, for example, plastic bubbles which hang on a mobile and hold in their precarious clutches small images of innocence, about to be burst. A series of inscriptions on to a collection of pale, pastel-coloured child’s panties appear both sinister and tragic.
It is the violation of that which is private which threatens the child’s ability to evaluate herself as innocent and worthy of love. In an attempt to rationalise this betrayal years later, she recalls the descriptions of herself as a young child: ”I was his little girl”, ”I was a happy baby”, ”I was a virgin”, ”I was three years old” and so on. In another corner, similar panties lie strewn, soiled with menstrual blood or lost virginity, a bowl of murky water to remove the evidence and shame.
Nursery school wallpaper and childhood holiday photographs are juxtaposed with pages from raunchy porn magazines. There is a tableau of teddy bears with ”scar”, ”pinch”, ”tease”, ”kick” and ”porn” burnt on to their chests.
In an ironic and self-conscious little play, Payne has left her copy of the Mail & Guardian lying open on the bed on a page referring to Freud and psychoananlysis. I imagine that there is enough loaded imagery and text in this installation to keep a psychoanalyst occupied for a long time. And like therapy, you’ll probably need to revisit this space more than once.
— Hush … Hush by Tracy Payne is on at 73 Rose Street, Bo-Kaap, Cape Town, until April 11