NYAB Event - Sarah Smelser "(Re)treat"

Sarah Smelser "(Re)treat"

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts

This event has ended.

In this, Illinois-based artist Sarah Smelser's second exhibition with Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, the print artist exhibits a new body of unique images in which her abstract visual language tells provocative stories of awkward, tentative shapes trying to find their way in a world brimming with shapes of color. Her technique is trace monotype - a complicated printing process in which an etching based linearity combines with rich washes of color absorbed on a thin Japanese paper. She restricts her palette to merely four or five colors, and reuses the forms in her image. She keeps certain words in her mind as she works - elegant, clumsy, awkward, poetic, musical, restrained, staid, limited, pure, necessary, flawed, mortal - while juxtaposing fantasy forms of different characters. Larger, solid shapes are blunt, almost macho, interacting with figures that are delicate and weak. Thus, her work seems familiar and strange at the same time. Forms confer and conflict with odd masses of color. Thoughtful, tensile lines interrupt and take over the storyline in their frailty. These slightly anthropomorphic and organic images weave and bob, pushing the narrative forward.