Susan Smith

Junior Projects is very pleased to present “Splinters”, a solo exhibition of recent work by Susan Smith. This is the artist’s first solo show at the gallery.

Since the 1980s, Susan Smith’s practice has consisted of collecting and reconfiguring architectural remnants from our industrialized urban society and responding to them with oil on canvas panels. Smith appropriates slices of New York City’s incessantly changing architectural landscape and, alongside her own oil paintings, using these raw materials as her palette—for example, a plastered slab from a demolished ceiling, a defaced Plexiglas mirror, leftover wooden scraps. While each relic celebrates the uniqueness of the found object, Smith’s assemblages propose a very human inquiry into our physical surroundings and also the illusory challenge to differentiate the street artifacts from the hand-painted panels. This visual slippage contrasts with the compact tension of the structured, often rectilinear finished work.

For example, in the work “Tag-Black No. 1” Smith edits two discarded, graffiti-tagged panels of plywood and affixes a richly painted black panel below them. The plywood panels, which are raw and evocative of what was once largely considered urban blight, are in direct conversation with the once revered painted monochrome; here, they are presented together. Smith’s lush brushwork on the painted monochrome black panel functions not as a void but rather as another kind of graffiti – her own.

Susan Smith was born in Greensburg, PA and lives and works in New York, NY. In 1976 she received her MA degree from Hunter College, New York, NY studying with Ralph Humphrey, Tony Smith, and Vincent Longo. In 2008 she received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters New York, NY and in 2009 an Edward Albee Foundation residency, Montauk, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include Isolo 17, Verona, Italy and Galerie Merkle, Stuttgart, Germany.