NYAB Event - Rebecca Smith “Strata”

Rebecca Smith “Strata”

Hionas Gallery LES

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Hionas Gallery presents Rebecca Smith “Strata”, comprising four recent polychrome, wall-mounted sculptures, constructed principally of painted steel, and interwoven with varying materials such as copper tubing, steel wool, and wooden tool handles.

Each of Smith’s recent works is characterized, if not defined, by their perceived weightlessness; an illusion achieved by the artist’s angled and curved pieces that intermingle and balance upon the extended supports, or “arms.” This deliberate stratification of distinct geometric forms yields abstract compositions that function as both painting and sculpture, and exist in a space wherein the criteria for each medium seems interchangeable.

When viewed straight on, the apparent juxtapositions comprise clearly defined lines and closed curves. As one approaches, however, and interacts with the work’s layers of shapes and pictograms, the physical balancing act Smith achieves comes to light (and shadow).

This act of both seeing and looking through the work is an inspired process of discovery. For Strata, the finesse and buoyancy of Smith’s sculptures are masterfully countered by the material strength of their supports. In resting the disparate building blocks onto the wall-mounted arms, the carefully laid sculptural composition assumes certain character traits of the mobile and stabile, and yet still bears traces of the artist’s painterly touch.

Rebecca Smith (b.1954, Washington, DC) grew up in Washington, DC, and upstate New York. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and The New York Studio School. First exhibiting in 1977, she has been making art since the late 1970s, in various media including painting, performance, sculpture and tape drawing installations. Her work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Microsoft, The Tarra-Warra Museum of Art, Australia, The Albright-Knox, and The Hyde Collection, among others. Smith recently had the distinction of being a co-curator, panelist and participating artist in EMISSIONS: Images from the Mixing Layer, as part of The Marfa Dialogues on Climate Change at Cooper Union. She exhibited a large sculpture, Noctilucent Clouds (2015), in Here and Above: A Dialogue Between Sculptures at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, which has been acquired by the museum and remains on view, 25 feet high on the atrium wall. Her first solo show with Hionas Gallery, Interference, was held in 2013.