Throughout my art career I have created objects, installations, and video works that pursue the relationship we have with architectural spaces. There is no question that we react to, and are shaped by our environment. A physical structure has the ability to evoke memory, create a narrative, or even conceal the truth. I am interested in the many ways we interpret space, and the assumptions we make based on their appearances. My recent body of work focuses on both social relationships and the relationship between household objects. I am creating narratives by assigning social qualities to inanimate objects and environments, addressing both the physical space and the emotions we associate with them.
I often use everyday materials such as plywood, carpeting, and interior paint. As part of my working process, I either use writing as a springboard for my ideas, or I start with a material I am attracted to and work with its inherent associations. Regardless of what form these ideas take, humor is an important component. However, just as joking can be a mechanism to cover anxiety or fear, the work has an underlying vulnerability that we can all relate to.
Do you love me now?, 2006
(A video installation created at CUE Art Foundation)
Do you love me now? is a video installation about social acceptance based on the way cosmetic companies title and market lipstick colors. I am interested in a quest for happiness through products that claim to bring fulfillment. In the world of marketing, successful companies create an emotional attachment to their products. We purchase them because they make us happy, feel like a better person, less stressed, loved, appreciated or accomplished. In a society obsessed with appearances, wearing lipstick is one of the ways we feel more desirable and better able to attract a mate. I have selected ten lipstick colors by Revlon and L’Oreal that together create a narrative about a sexual encounter. In order they are; bronze beauty, bed of roses, make me blush, sensual spice, kiss me coral, scarlet seduction, shamelessly nude, raisin rapture, volcanic, and pink afterglow. There is an implication that merely purchasing the right lipstick will bring you the experience of love.
Talasco had her first solo exhibition, Property Line, in 2002 at McGrath Galleries in New York City. Her work was included in a group exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, AIM 23, 2003. Other group exhibitions include; I.dent.it.(y), 2006 at Rabbit Hole Studios, Brooklyn, NY; This one time…, 2006 at Kiana Malekzadeh Gallery, NYC; Flat Files, 2006, Tilt Gallery + Project Space, Portland, OR; Affordable Art Fair, 2002, NYC; Small Works, 2000, at NYU’s 80 Washington Square East Galleries, NYC; and Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, 1998; Home, 1998 both at Vertigo Gallery in Philadelphia. Her work is included in several private collections and artist registries nationwide.
Traci is currently an artist-in-residence at CUE Art Foundation in New York City. She was a finalist this year for Art in General’s New Commissions Program, and has an upcoming solo project at Art Space in New Haven, CT in 2007. She is also an arts educator with Studio in a School, where she teaches fine art to elementary school children in the NYC public school system.
Talasco was born in 1974 in Newburgh, NY. She received her BFA in Glassblowing and Sculpture in 1996 from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA. Traci and her husband moved to Manhattan in 1997, a childhood dream of hers since the age of seven. Her studio is located in east Harlem, where she has worked for the past six years.