Tracey Baran

1975–2008

Galleries:
Arratia, Beer, Berlin
Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York




Throughout her career, Tracey Baran’s locus (and indeed her muse) was the small upstate New York town where she grew up, including friends and family members living there, familiar houses, and the surrounding landscape.  As a photographer, Baran excelled at discovering evocative, visually lush, and oftentimes unsettling potentials in gritty around the house or around the town settings. Two photographs in Carnival Within were taken at a local demolition derby, where drivers in rugged cars attempt to smash each other to bits; the last car still functioning and moving is the winner. In Crushed, 2005, a car done up in brilliant carnival colors is mashed, dented, and covered with mud; trying for splendor it wound up as a demoralized loser. In The Winners, 2005, with cars resembling nocturnal silhouettes and eerie white smoke billowing above them against a black sky, the whole scene looks like a war zone, or perhaps an apocalyptic dream. Both images - and this is something that holds true throughout Baran’s work - take what could be cheesy Americana and turn it into a profound meditation on cycles of living and dying, aspirations and disappointment, vitality and damage.

Although formally exquisite and visually riveting, Tracey Baran’s photographs are connected to the common and accessible genres of family snapshots, pictures of friends, and road shots. What is most uncommon is how otherwise mundane circumstances become startling, marvelous, and imbued with a complex humanity that can be lovely but also harrowing. Willfully goofy Halloween shots of Baran’s mother in Native American garb and herself as a pregnant dead bride are haunting and unnerving, while a photograph of her friend partially veiled by the colorful mists near a geyser at Yellowstone National Park seems downright magical.

 

Exhibitions | Bibliography

Exhibitions:
2007: Note To Self, Arratia Beer, Berlin
2006: See Through Me, Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York
2005–06: Speaking with Hands: Photography from the Buhl Collection, Museum Folkwang, Essen; The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao/New York

Bibliography:
Rebecca Robertson, “Tracey Baran,” in ARTnews, summer 2006
Speaking with Hands: Photographs from the Buhl Collection, texts by Jennifer Blessing, Kirsten A. Hoving, and Ralph Rugoff, exh. cat. Guggenheim Museum, New York 2004
Barry Schwabsky, “Tracey Barran: The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicaco,” in Art on Paper, March 2003