ArchiveExhibition
Tracy TV
10 Feb-31 Mar 2024
TACO!
London SE2 9FA
Credit: Still from Garden (2023), Tracy Sada
Overview
Tracy TV is a collection of artist films made by the artist Tracy Sada. Shown together at TACO! as a looping showreel, each of the films takes the form of a short low production DIY ‘video vignette’, that collectively offer a captivating fast paced viewing experience more often encountered when channel hopping or browsing social media.
Tracy employs a distinct and knowing ‘pop’ sensibility, performing music and lyrics directly to camera both as her persona ‘Tracy Soothes’, and as herself. Within her films Tracy often refers to herself in the 3rd person - simultaneously playing the central subject and the main protagonist, whilst also undertaking the filming, lighting, staging and editing.
Made over a four year period between 2020-2024, the videos show Tracy Sada / Tracy Soothes sharing candid desires and intimate personal thoughts on her everyday experiences - giving the films a distinctive diaristic quality. Tracy explores freely topics as diverse as British culture, immigration, wigs, social performance, blackness, female identity, body confidence, nostalgia, and desire.
Her analog and sensual aesthetic blends ideas, tropes and references borrowed from independent cinema, scratch video, surrealist film, music videos, and Nigerian Nollywood. Signature visual phrases, sounds and clips are often repeated throughout the showreel, giving it a stylistic feel of MTV.
Tracy Sada is a Nigerian born, British artist, singer songwriter and producer from SE London whose practice mixes music, performance, fashion, film, and digital space. She records and performs regularly across the UK and Internationally. This is her first public presentation of her films in a UK gallery.
