Tracy McMenemy’s work continues to voice the geography, environment,
and history of a specific locale through her responsive engagement with
it. A recent move brought a variety of new stimuli to the artist’s studio,
and it was just outside her door that a specific aspect of the city’s culture
presented itself: the street poster.
Public posters announcing and celebrating local events are of course not
unique to our time. Paris’s Belle Epoque saw the flowering of posters
across the city following late nineteenth century advancements in
lithographic printing, with other European centres distinguishing both
their own styles and the unique cultural scenes they reflected. Art
movements themselves such as the Viennese Secession, the Arts and
Crafts movement, and Art Nouveau are inextricable from their poster
history, while extending across galleries, theatres, opera houses,
architecture, and interior design. These movements shared their
influence everywhere, and, through the street-level poster, with
everyone. The poster world that McMenemy investigates finds such
cultural reach and democratic resonance very much alive.
Tracy McMenemy’s body of work shows her consistently attuned to
details of her environment that give its wider characteristics voice. She
takes in her surroundings both specifically and as a whole, from allowing
Grand Cayman’s Silver Thatch Palm and the Hibiscus flower to shape
her compositions in her Hibiscus Thatch series, to her in situ digital
interaction with her forest,field, mountain, and seaside surroundings in
Folded Earth, to her site-specific interpretive documenting in Ghost
Passages of the McKenzie Shipyard.
The posters on street poles throughout her downtown location speak to
a vibrant, multi-level, interconnected arts scene. To a receptive observer,
their colourful graphics and varied styles offer an ever-changing reading
of the wider city’s colours. As with street posters throughout the world
and throughout history, this public, ground-level advertising platform is
anyone’s to engage, and offers to reach everyone. The posters also
belong very much to the present. The events they speak to play out
within a local time frame, while the paper itself gets overlaid, weathered,
and peeled through passing weeks and months. The pole’s history - and
the city culture’s - becomes layered like a tree’s bark does, and, in
McMenemy’s case, a location point for time and place.
Her initial response was to collect poster imagery, via photograph and
falling pieces of poster, into a small bank of materials in her studio. The
relatively small size of these posters and their fragments contrasted with
a sense of physical interaction on the scale of a full-bodied engagement
with the street and city. Without a preconceived plan around her
collection, McMenemy grew compelled to bridge these elements of
scale, inviting large canvases, broad brush painting, striking colour, and
an expansion of the collage aesthetic suggested by the posters’ layers
and pieces, to determine the main elements of this series’ visual
language.
Her resulting series, aptly titled Post No Bills, captures the essence of
the public space posters occupy, and their fleeting presence in time. The
paintings’ size amplifies the open space - the street - where posters live.
In naming each work for the date on which McMenemy encountered the
poster, she holds their transience in time against the archivist’s - and
artist’s - creation of a lasting reflection of history.
In 15.03.23, we see parts of a street address and event date between
fragments of other poster pieces, all re-created with hand-painted acrylic
to mimic and enlarge the torn edges, folds, and wear of her original
subject. As with the other paintings in this series, the overall composition
is that of a collage, with the distinction that the textures, colours, and
shapes of her collected poster references are all re-created with large
scope brushstrokes on a single plane of canvas. 06.03.23 suggests a
stack of aged posters, with a wrinkled Monster Energy logo still visible
below the suggestion of a downtown street address. The painter’s full
body movement across these bright, full-sized compositions alternates
with specific recreated details of QR codes, dates, artist and venue info,
and other visual specifics original to the material of posters laid upon
upon posters, themselves interlaced with stickers, tags, and the other
street markings. The paintings’ emotive power plays out both in the
moving boldness of McMenemy’s large strokes and bold colours, and in
the immediate familiarity of the details she caringly recreates. The
importance of time is not only reflected in the titles, but in the
juxtaposition between the single frame image that any painting is, and
the wider passage of time, history, and change that a street poster
enters, and is soon engulfed by. Thus McMenemy works here to archive
an aesthetic that is both current and, as her paintings remain through
passing years, historic, ultimately transcending boundaries, cultures, and
time.
Through her process, McMenemy also became drawn to masks as a
reflection of the poster’s human interactivity. In keeping with the sense of
collage developed in the paintings, she uses the poster fragments
themselves to build onto mannequin heads via acrylic medium. These
fragments, like this series, remain abundant, overlapping, and energetic,
as McMenemy works their ephemeral presence into a lasting reflection
of their time. While their incorporation of actual collage reflects pop art’s
found materials and advertising references a la Rushca, Warhol and
Rauschenberg, to which McMenemy is no stranger, her own organic
response to the immediate materials is precedent. The faces she builds
are covered in, split against, and shaped by the images around us.
These images, like this series, remain abundant, overlapping, and
energetic. McMenemy works their ephemeral presence into a lasting
reflection of their time, which she encourages us to recognize with the
same open invitation the posters themselves hold.