David Castillo Gallery presents Shinique Smith's Kaleidoscopic

Opening reception: May 17, 2013, 6:00 – 10:00 p.m.
From May 17 through July 6, 2013.

Shinique Smith weaves memory and potentiality into forms that shimmer between safety net and open sky; private and public narrative; the smoothness of solace and the terror of sublimity. Like the spider, Smith sees multiple dimensions at once. The artist’s swaddles of suspended clothing are both intimate cells and self-sufficient worlds tethered to individual experience. Smith’s mixed media paintings are material-semiotic objects that thrive on the agency of reconstitution, the sweep of a maypole, and the guttural kiss of graffiti.

In Archaeologies of the Future, Fredric Jameson identifies the utopian imagination in the age of postmodernity and late capitalism by a shift from what can be wished for to the formal properties of the act of wishing. Likewise, Smith’s mandalic hybrids investigate the inscription of mythology onto material culture, including the body, calligraphy, fabric, rope, ribbon, paint, and found objects.

Smith re-imagines the exclamation of squid ink into water or the underground language of American quilts as if to quell the contradiction between closed systems of mythology and open systems of history described by Claude Levi-Strauss. The referent of Smith’s Chimera’s Breath is thrillingly metaphorical and material.

The archive, according to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, is an act of encounter rather than a site of remembrance. Kaleidoscopic is likewise infinitely experiential. The artist’s instantiation of quotidian materials, painterly sensibilities, and space excavate a sacred geometry– connecting all possible points of existence. Smith rewrites David Castillo Gallery like a chambered nautilus, both logarithmic and graceful beyond reason. Every artwork is an antechamber to an affective plane, a zone of sacrifice between anchorage and imminence.

Shinique Smith was born in Baltimore, MD and lives and works in Hudson, NY. Smith earned her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Upcoming in 2013, Shinique Smith has been commissioned by New York’s MTA Arts for Transit to create a permanent public work at the new Mother Clara Hale Bus Depot in Harlem. Also upcoming is a solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (October 2014 to March 2015), curated by Jen Mergel. Recent solo exhibitions include Los Angeles County Museum of Art in collaboration with the Charles White Elementary School, Los Angeles, CA; Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL; the Studio Museum in Harlem, and others. The artist is currently included in Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami’s “Pivot Points: 15 Years & Counting- MOCA’s 15th Anniversary Collection,” through May 19, 2013. Recent group shows include 30 Americans, which originated at the Rubell Family Collection, Miami; as well as exhibitions at The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; North Carolina Museum of Art; Bronx Museum; Brooklyn Museum; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The New Museum, New York, NY, among others. Smith’s works are in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Denver Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Margulies Collection, Miami; Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore; The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. She is a past fellow of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and many others.

David Castillo Gallery
2234 NW 2nd Avenue
Miami, FL 33127
305.573.8110
www.davidcastillogallery.com