Tracey Rose at The Project

Art in America, Dec, 2004 by D.C. Murray

Tracey Rose is part of an exciting contingent of young cultural producers who are confronting Western notions about African culture. Often linked to the emergent discourse on African modernity and the diaspora, this South African-born multimedia artist has amassed an impressive body of provocative works. Her latest solo exhibition presented a series called "Lucie's Fur Version 1:1:1," a complex interweaving of themes ranging from Christianity and Western hegemony to sexuality and gender-bending. The title is an allusion to Lucy, or the "African Eve," whose bodily remains were uncovered in Ethiopia in the 1970s, a discovery that spawned a contentious debate around issues of race, evolution and science.

The exhibition consisted of a series of Iris prints, a wallpaper installation and a 16mm film projection. The large-scale photographic series continues Rose's engagement with feminist concerns through the embodiment of fictional personas. For example, Mme. OEUF! (2003) depicts an enigmatic black Virgin Mary, clad in a striking blue dress and a silver egg-shaped mask that obscures her face. In a spin on Eurocentric conceptualizations of the Virgin, Rose's Mary, like Chris Ofili's, incorporates African symbology while conserving an array of references to canonical Western painting. Continuing this theme, Adam & Yves B.C.--2003 (2004)--a playful rift on Judeo-Christian mythology--presents the original couple as waiflike, gay male Zulu lovers. Wearing only strategically placed fig leaves, the two figures emerge from a dense tropical forest.

On the right wall of the gallery's entrance was Fucking Flowers, a floor-to-ceiling wallpaper installation depicting a bevy of sculptural phalluses--a copious amount of viscous fluid oozing from them--protruding like naughty stamens from a vast field of red and violet flowers. Most successful, however, is The Wailers (2004), a 16mm film projection of five white South African boys dressed in traditional Hasidic clothing and playing underwater basketball against a backdrop that Rose intends to symbolize Jerusalem's Wailing Wall. Wailers is intended to function as allegory densely coded with symbolism: the first five books of the Old Testament, the five-sided pentagram, the five extremities of the human body and the five stages of the biblical tree of life--seed, root, trunk, branch and fruit. The figures' playful water dance is as humorous as it is visually striking. Ultimately, her work resonates because of its poetic engagement with contemporary identity politics and its attendant iconographies. Rose avoids a reactionary polemic that would obfuscate the depth of her production.