Tracey Rose

"Making work is a documentation of a journey – each stage, each process, each dilemma has to be worked through. At one time I felt pressured to do a lot of things at the same time, but now I want to take one step at a time. When you make an artwork you're not just doing something at that moment, you're contributing to an entire history of artmaking."

Ms. Rose, who is based in South Africa, has tackled ideas of gender and race in interesting, sometimes audacious ways over the last few years. On the evidence of this show, her forms are rapidly growing more sophisticated, her images sharper, her thinking more complex – all of which bodes very well for the future of an artist still only in her 20s.

Irrespective of the self-consciousness of the image, irrespective of the element of pastiche, what lifts the image above and beyond the influences and constraints that shape it is that sense of pleasure, of laughter, that lightness. Thereby, through laughter, through what Roland Barthes's famously termed jouissance or bliss, the iconic or representational quality of the work dissolves or, at least, is strategically foregrounded yet kept in abeyance. If the work is about race, about gender, it is also about something far greater: love. By this I mean that Rose has not only shown us the obvious, but through the obvious – racial conflict and sexual difference – she has managed to point a way forward. This way is one which eschews the pathological and perverse, which conceives of South Africa not as a place that is irresistible and unlovable but, all the more profoundly, as a place that is resistible and lovable. For Rose this resistance assumes a reflexive turn: it shows the object of critique, then approaches it at a glance. This glance, like the playful hooded eyes of the woman in The Kiss, is loaded in its seeming frivolity. That the work possesses a populist appeal, and, at the same time, is able to assist us in rethinking the pathology of our history, makes it all the more significant and durable.

According to Sue Williamson, "Tracey Rose is not a practitioner who jumps at every curatorial opportunity offered her, and has been known to withdraw from more than one exhibition if the circumstances have not seemed right." Rose's work has been widely exhibited in Africa, Europe and the United States. Recent solo exhibitions include "The Cockpit" at MC, Los Angeles, CA, "Plantation Lullabies" at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa, both in 2008.

Recent group exhibitions include "El mirall sud-africà" at the Centre De Cultura Contemporània De Barcelona, Spain, "Mouth Open, Teeth Showing: Major Works from the True Collection" at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, "Memories of Modernity" in Malmo, Sweden, "Check List: Luanda Pop" at the African Pavilion in the 52nd Venice Biennale, Italy, "Heterotopias" at the Thessaloniki Biennale in Greece, and "Global Feminisms" at The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in Brooklyn, New York (all 2007), and the 11th Lyon Biennale "A terrible beauty is born" in 2011.

The Felliniesque video Ciao Bella is on view in the upstairs gallery. Originally shown at the 2001 Venice Biennial, it's a stationary panorama in which several grotesque characters – again played by Ms. Rose – perform on a long altarlike tabletop. A schoolmarmish hostess comes and goes; a smiling blond nymphet in dead-white makeup flagellates herself; a woman in an 18th-century wig spasmodically spoons out chocolate cake; a black, nude woman is put on display and eventually hanged.

Caryatid & BinneKant Die Wit Does and Imperfect Performance: A tale in Two States are among her most recent live performances, seen at the Düsseldorf Art Fair in Germany, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, respectively. In 2001 Rose was also included in "Plateau de l'humanite" in the 49th Venice Biennale curated by Harald Szeemann.

Since her mid nineties graduation from the University of Witwatersrand, Rose has had an extremely busy few years internationally, as her CV shows. In much of her work in this time, Rose has investigated questions of gender and colour, often through the visual motifs of her own body and body hair. In Ongetiteld (Untitled), shown on 'Democracys Images' at Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden in 1998, Rose again used surveillance cameras to film herself shaving off all of her bodily hair. In the catalogue, Rose describes this act as being "about both demasculating and de-feminising my body, shaving off the masculine and feminine hair. This kind of de-sexualisation carries with it a certain kind of violence. The piece is about making myself unattractive and unappealing. But what was disconcerting was that I suddenly became attractive to a whole different group of people. Perhaps there was not enough of a sense of penance and flagellation in the work."

Tracey Rose was born in 1974 in Durban, South Africa. She attended the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in Fine Arts where she obtained her B.A. in 1996. She taught at Vaal Triangle Technikon, Vanderbijl Park, South Africa and at the University of the Witwatersrand. In February and March 2001 she was artist-in-residence in Cape Town at the South African National Gallery where she developed her work for the Venice Biennale 2001 curated by Harald Szeemann. Tracey Rose is represented in the US by Christian Haye of The Project.