FOUR-D Presents Brittany Tucker: Studied

Press Release:

In keeping with its commitment to showcasing emerging multidisciplinary artists, FOUR-D will host a solo presentation by Brittany Tucker, an artist and writer from New York City, and a recent Bard College graduate.

In this deeply personal body of work, Tucker depicts herself in a beautifully emotive photorealism. A figure of whiteness (rendered in outline) acts as her counterpart: confronting her as her lovers, her teachers, as flowers, as books, in classrooms and bedrooms. Tucker refers to this treatment of whiteness as “dis-representation”, using it to flip the imagery of minstrelsy, with its reduction of blackness to a limited cast of hideous caricatures, onto the white body and institution.

Seriously playful and painfully incisive Tucker’s work examines the complications of learning who she is through the eyes of the other, and the struggle of forming her own self despite (and because) of it. The tension in this work lies in the way that Brittany interacts with these figures, which dances, sometimes literally, on the line between intimacy and subjugation. In Squish, two hands tightly hold her face, squeezing and disfiguring it. In I Read the Book On You, a teacher’s hand rests on her shoulder, while Brittany's hand covers the mouth of the outlined white face on the cover.

In the corresponding statement to the piece, Tucker writes,  “Slavery in America began in 1619, it’s four hundred years later and I’m in love but it’s hard to forgive you. You didn’t do anything. Yet you benefit. Yet I wade through it. I was taught but I could’ve been told, I could’ve been told or I could’ve remembered. I could have lived and died in it but I was taught instead. It’s complicated. But I love you. I love you three-fifths. It’s a compromise.”