Tracey Emin, "I Can Feel Your Smile"
Lehmann Maupin, through Dec 17
By Sophie Fels
If Tracey Emin's late, great, brightly embroidered tent Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 wrapped up her wild youth, the largely monochromatic work in "I Can Feel Your Smile" describes a more sedate life, ten years on. But Emin's first U.S. solo show in three years, which opened more than a year after her infamous tent was allegedly destroyed in a London warehouse fire, is no less confessional than her last.
The artist now pens a column for the British newspaper The Independent and also just wrote an autobiography titled Strangeland. So it comes as no surprise that she's refined her use of memoir, focusing her once- scattered attention in white-on-white samplers addressed to a single absent lover, embroidered with pleas like why did you stop me from loving you? In these works viewers are seduced by the illusion of intimacy, rather than forced into the role of voyeur to Emin's promiscuous misadventures.
Of the four sculptures here, only one - the titular neon sign I Can Feel Your Smile - is not primarily made out of wood. The rest, piles of chipped wainscoting and recovered lumber, invoke a ransacked permanence. Built into a tidy spiral-stair pattern in Sleeping with You, the weathered wood evokes stability, whereas the pyre of ragged tinder in Salem communicates loss. Other works in they show include stark pen and pencil drawings, watercolors and a hazy short film. They are powerful, even when, as in the case of the film, baldly sentimental. In recent interviews, Emin has announced that she's begun to make paintings - further evidence that this former YBA wild child is all grown up.