Carousel
Carousel
April 1st – April 30th
Several years ago, I purchased an unclaimed family album in the form of eight hundred Kodachrome slides from the Brass Armadillo Antique Mall outside of Denver. Each slide was meticulously dated, captioned, and curated, probably by the mother. The collection spanned two decades, from 1954 to 1974: the height of the “Kodak Moment” amidst the invention of the carousel projector.
Throughout the pandemic, when adult coloring books became a national pastime and family units turned into impenetrable pods, I began creating a series of layered drawings from these photographs by tracing projections of every suburban, WASP-y, nuclear family tradition that this abandoned archive contained: birthday parties, high school reunions, Christmas mornings, Easter Sundays, Eagle Scout ceremonies, graduations, weddings, school concerts, summer road trips, county fairs, and finally, a lone cruise to the Caribbean. Most of these events took place in Fort Collins, Colorado, or near the father’s hometown of Bagley, Minnesota.
Carousel reimagines this mid-century moment and its embedded value system as a critically nostalgic, reverse-engineered coloring book, where memories are stripped of their colorful realism and rendered as illusive as the technology that created them.
– Britland Tracy, Artist
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Britland Tracy is a visual artist and educator from the Pacific Northwest whose work engages photography, text, and ephemera to illuminate the infrastructures of human connection and discord. She has published two artist books, Show Me Yours and Pardon My Creep, and exhibited at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA, Davis Orton Gallery in Hudson, NY, Rule Gallery in Marfa, TX, Redline Contemporary Art Center in Denver, CO, the Lucie Foundation in Los Angeles, CA, the Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle, WA, and the CU Art Museum in Boulder, CO, as well as a number of other experimental and collaborative spaces. She holds a BA in French from the University of Washington, a Certificate in Fine Art Photography from the Photographic Center Northwest, and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts Practices from the University of Colorado, where she teaches remotely while living and making in Marfa, Texas.
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Public hours:
Wednesdays through Sundays, 12:00pm – 6:00pm
The artist will be present on Wednesdays
Soft Opening April 1st, 6:00pm – 9:00pm
Closing Party April 30th, 6:00pm – 9:00pm
Understudy is free-to-visit and open to all. We are located at the Colorado Convention Center / Theatre District light rail stop near 14th and Stout. Look for the Shantell Martin art bench.
