ARTIST RESIDENCY: TRACY HAYES
OCT. 4 - NOV. 1 2024
The first resident artist, Tracy Hayes, was onsite every Thursday and Friday in October 2024, creating new iterations of her Obliteration Scrolls and incorporating time-based video projection. She had weekly special demos and workshops during Sound & Color in Concord, NH on October 18 & 19, 2025.
The Obliteration Scrolls explores the intersection of language and visual art, using a unique process that combines dark and light media to create compelling stop-motion videos. This residency aims to deepen her exploration of obliteration, balancing tension between anticipation and access.
This exhibition became a live chance to witness Tracy’s innovative process and engage in a dialogue about art and language.
ABOUT THE SERIES
Tracy Hayes worked on drawings, installations and video projection from her Obliteration Scrolls series. The scrolls are personal. Initially, access to a seemingly never ending roll of paper and indulging in a work preference of drawing in intimate settings morphed into an interest in the fickle nature of language and story. Considering poetry as “accepted” text-based subversion to dominant social structures which set rules/norms, I sought clues of what was unsettling, destabilizing and... potentially threatening to mature the syntax within personal visual language. The nature of obscuring while proceeding into the next section led to imagining that this exploration of freedom might be a version of a book, though not literally.
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"My intent is to work on these Obliterations Scrolls past the point I have achieved until recently, to encourage a more complete disintegration of the working surface, paper, as a natural destructive outcome from the overworking (and documentation) of the water-based media and see what questions arise - as a full expression of literal obliteration. Obliteration of surface with alternating series of black marks and white speaks both to a type of rage but also a need to assert my own pleasure in the making process. The marks resemble a type of language or mantra, or an attempt to speak about the unspeakable." Tracy Hayes
THE RESIDENCY
Tracy Hayes and Mariana Paz spent time in the space together creating performance art. Paz worked though the space dancing in her feathers and almost floating through interplaying with Haye's moving work.
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Resonance of Memory
Memory, a mosaic of moments,
I seek to unravel the threads of the past,
To invite a deeper reflection.
I welcome viewers to immerse,
To discover the delicate dance between the past and the present.
Tracing the lines of our history like a map,
Where time is not just passing,
But etched into the fabric of our being—
Stretching beyond the reach of now.
My work explores this resonance—
The interplay between memory and identity.
Mariana Paz
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Tracy Hayes is a mixed media artist, she works in series with explorations of charcoal, acrylic and oil on paper and canvas. Her imagery remains vaguely subterranean and emerges from a process that is as reliant upon drawn media layered with painted. There are earthen references that are reiterated within tonal palette. There are also glimpses of what lies within, though entry is barred. Billowing shapes hold viewer aloft and safely at a distance as access points emerge in one instance to then break apart in another. Structures appear briefly only to dissipate and dissolve. These works seek to make sense of a world just outside of reach, beckoning yet elusive.
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TRACYHAYESART.COM
Mariana Paz is an interdisciplinary artist who migrated to the United States from Argentina in 2001 and established herself in Boston, MA. She graduated from Lesley University in 2020 with a Master of Fine Arts. Paz is an artist whose practice is an exploration that ties together her personal experience with migration, hardship, discrimination, visibility, and invisibility, by drawing connections to those
who are in similar confinements. She is a dancer and performance artist who sees beauty in our everyday movements. She embraces a more instinctive and spiritual form of movement than traditional practices. Using her own narrative and personal memory to reveal raptures, she draws links between the past and present to create layers of meaning. Paz acknowledges a long history of oppression, resilience, and undying strength that is reflected in her community and others. Her art serves as a portal to liminal spaces that enable audiences to reclaim, rebuild, and restore their spirits through participation and communion.
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