Tracy + The Plastics 101

The Frye presents Tracy + the Plastics, a band created and performed by “lesbian feminist video artist” Wynne Greenwood. Playing all three band members, Greenwood conflates the space of the real and the virtual by inhabiting the stage live as lead singer Tracy and virtually in video projections as Nikki, the keyboardist, and Cola, the drummer. These private performances, recorded for the camera in Greenwood’s bedroom and basement, depart from the typically public nature of Tracy + the Plastics shows, performed nationally in universities and alternative music spaces.

In performing solely for the camera lens, Greenwood engages many of the same issues central to Acting Out: Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. Exploring the construction of feminist, lesbian, and artistic identities, Greenwood’s private domestic performances shed a contemporary light on Cahun and Moore’s collaborative artistic practice of decades earlier.

Brooklyn-based artist Wynne Greenwood, originally from the Seattle area, received her MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts. In addition to club performances, Tracy + the Plastics have recently received art world acclaim, appearing in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2004 Biennial.

Greenwood’s most recent project ROOM (2005), in collaboration with artist Fawn Krieger, premiered this past April at The Kitchen in New York City, an important center for new and experimental performance and video.

”I say I’m in a band, I also say I’m a video artist and I just recently was able to push the words performance artist past my tongue. I guess I don’t really consider it acting, maybe re-enacting. You know, maybe it’s the difference between Civil War re-enactors and Hollywood actors. I’m performing a band.”
–Wynne Greenwood