E.E. Smith "Diversions"
Kim Foster Gallery
This event has ended.
The gallery presents an exhibition of new photo-based oil prints by E.E. Smith. Her still-life prints center on games and comment on the current economic and political climate. The show's genesis lies in a recent visit to the Netherlands where she revisited and was inspired by the 17th century Dutch still life painting she saw there. In these images, Smith invokes the memento mori, a genre that asks the viewer to heed the brevity of life. With a nod to the contemporary penchant for amusement over mindfulness, her work, on the one hand, tells us that games offer a distraction from reality, while on the other, makes references to the very issues these distractions would mask.
In "Lotto," the centerpiece of this exhibit, Smith mounts forty-five vivid images in a grid formation, suggestive of the popular Mexican Lotería and lottery learning games for children. The images, of small objects found around the house, common things encountered in everyday life, are silhouetted, cut off from any contextual setting. Man-made objects (along with a few natural ones) are presented in luminous black-and white, while fruit and flowers glow with intense color, an allusion to slot machine symbols. Like the cards in the Latin game, this assortment of alluring objects seems full of symbolism and emotion, giving them a timeless quality of a Tarot card.
Included in "Diversions" are a series of more traditional still-life prints that incorporate games directly. Smith gives us playing cards, dominoes, and three English walnuts (literally a shell game), overt references to gaming and gambling. These luscious, richly colored oil prints, a medium Smith has been working in for over two decades, are both lyrical and sinister, and hark back to a long visual history of depicting the role chance plays in our lives.
[Image: E.E. Smith "Lotto (selection from)" (2012) oil prints, each 20 x 16 in. framed]
Media
Schedule
from February 14, 2013 to March 16, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-02-14 from 18:00 to 20:00