Gray-matter chatter

Lee Tracy, Untitled, 2005.

Lee Tracy was confused. Perplexed. Still is. But in a good way. “It’s almost like I had threads attached to my brain that were thoughts that didn’t belong to me, and I had to get out the scissors and start cutting them,” Tracy says. “And I’m still cutting them today.” She may still have some snipping to do, but chatting with us in her Near North studio, it seems Tracy has clipped her way free of whatever impeded her in the past. The latest evidence is “Negative to Positive,” her show at the International Museum of Surgical Science.Seven years ago, numbness in her face sent Tracy to the hospital for a brain scan. It came back negative. The symptoms abated; Tracy moved on, but she wasn’t quite the same. “That was really a period of change for me, a period of questioning,” she says. “Things like, What does it mean to be an artist? What’s my role? How am I supposed to sustain that—be in the world but yet apart from it? I have those answers today. And now, a lot of what I learned, I’m able to push into action. But then there are bigger questions that I can’t answer and I don’t think anyone can. I don’t want to say [that the questions are about] the meaning of life. It’s not that. But how does the universe work? And is there a pattern? I like going into topics like that.”

In the past, Tracy has worked in various natural environments, subjecting objects—teardrop-shaped forms, swaths of red fabric—to sun, wind and water. Those public art projects were forays, overtures to the bigger world—that bit of the universe we call home (when we remember that there’s more to our world than city streets and that strip of beach to which we occasionally escape). “I have missed what Ansel Adams saw, what Blake saw, what Yeats writes about,” Tracy says, “that there are answers in nature that help us to understand our humanness. I wanted that experience, so I had to go out and create it. And it’s funny how it works, because although it is life-altering, it doesn’t hit until after I leave, as I’m driving back to the city. Then it’s, Wow, what did I just do?”

Her artwork took the form of journeys as well as challenges to her perception of art and art making. Many of Tracy’s projects involve site-specific installations in remote locations, and the process is then documented with photographs. Although confined to a gallery space, “Negative to Positive” is a journey, too; it’s a trip back to that period of change in Tracy’s life and a trip forward, an expression of her newfound willingness to accept uncertainty as a partner in her pursuits, rather than an importunate hindrance. “I don’t apply for grants because there’s too much writing about what you’re going to do and why you’re going to do it,” Tracy laughs. “I tried a few, but it’s not for me, because I know what I’m going to set out to do, I don’t know why and I don’t know the meaning until after it’s done. I like this process of not knowing.”

“Negative to Positive” centers around images of Tracy’s brain from that long-ago scan, on which she has etched thoughts she penned back when she was seeking help—such somewhat cryptic observations as, “Throw stuff out there,” or “Every thought gets a new wrinkle.” Mementos, urgings, shadows of life, these black-and-white images underscore the fragility—and potential—of the human body and its dreams and desires. The scans are mounted in light boxes on the wall.Looking back, Tracy relates, “I wanted to be free; I wanted to use my brain; I wanted to think expansive thoughts. But I realized I wasn’t free, because so many of the ideas in my head were planted there as a child, or each time I walked out to Whole Foods or the gas station. Thoughts that weren’t mine. So I’m freer from that experience. I know what I want.”

“Negative to Positive” is on view at the International Museum of Surgical Science through July 21.