PHILADELPHIA- Tiger Strikes Asteroid is pleased to announce the opening of its August exhibition, Highlights, Low Fades, and Deep Cuts, a solo exhibition of recent works by Tracy Thomason. Thomason’s work employs conventional painting and sculptural materials along with personal materials and actions – a deconstructed leather glove, hair gel, temperance, self-tanner, tears, oil, paper clay, and canvas are among the materials in her studio arsenal. Expertly manipulated, these materials yield work that is wildly tactile, is evocative of an intersection between aggression and decoration, embodies gendered beauty rituals of transformation, and highlights a tenuous balance between improvisation and careful composition.

The show’s essayist, Melissa Giannini, notes:
Tracy Thomason?s work stirs an impulse to touch, try on, wrap oneself up inside the history of her chosen (often donated and/or recycled) materials, evoking sunny afternoons spent rifling through a rack of threadbare jeans and faded leather jackets at a thrift store, a faint pencil mark waiting to be brushed away like a stray hair off a lover?s shoulder. Actual hair drapes from abstract canvases like a lowered false eyelash or Amish-style beard. A chunk of alabaster glows with the embarrassed blush of expertly applied rouge. Splotches of hair gel blot a stretched canvas like sex. A felted and dyed yoga mat is infused with a sense of abandoned (or repurposed) idealism. Simply put, her pieces speak for themselves.

Tracy Thomason was born in Gaithersburg, Maryland and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad, recently with James Fuentes Gallery in New York, NY, Nudashank in Baltimore, MD, and Second Home Projects in Berlin. She received her MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in 2008 and her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 2006. She has given lectures at Cranbrook Academy of Art and the University of Knoxville, TN. Tracy is a fourth generation female artist.