Molly Smith between you and me
April 11 - May 13, 2008
installation images selected works thumbnails
Press Release
Between you and me, Molly Smith's second one-person exhibition at KS Art, consists of large-scale paintings on paper and cast plaster sculptures. Combining an ephemeral materialism with uncanny mechanics, the artist's confounding imagery can never quite be pinned down. Smith's work evokes the sleep of reason and the porous boundaries that separate the known from the unknown.
Smith's recent work plumbs the netherworld of the body and sexuality, depicting perhaps orifices, detumescence, or fluids. Spare, recognizable forms transmogrify into formless poetics and open-ended suggestiveness. At once elegant and disturbing, Smith's watercolors and sculptures can be characterized as graceful, semantic slips-slipping traces of underworlds and more recently, of psychological undertows or underbellies.
Smith's most recent sculptures are cast in plaster using a fugitive, one-use-only-type of mold: frequently tinted with skin-tone hues, the artist's forms are slumped, twisted, knotted, and folded-corporeal ciphers or objective correlatives, perhaps, for unique states of being and feeling. In her two-dimensional work vast washes, fine lines, and the negative space between them collapse image and abstraction, evoking mystery. The exhibition's title "between you and me" reminds us that Smith is interested not only in the relationship of the physical and the emotional, but also in spaces between bodies, the secrets they conceal, and what separates you from me.
Molly Smith lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BFA from Rhode Island College of Design and an MFA from Columbia University, New York.