EMILY MAE SMITH

On view from May 3 through May 10, 2025, Smith’s “Western Painting” extends her visual vocabulary to a playful hometown homage. Abundant with nods to Texas, where Smith was born and raised, the painting features saloon doors and a limestone threshold, with longhorns looming atop the entryway. The latter motif imitates a handlebar mustache, a signature of her earlier works, lending the look of a grinning tycoon. An iconic symbol of the swaggering Old West, the batwing doors, which read “Gentle” and “Men” across each wood-grained shutter, signal an entrance to another realm. The saloon, as the gatekept and male-dominated institution of the American frontier, can be imagined as a parallel to the historically exclusionary Western institution of painting.

The variety of textures and close-to-life size of the passageway, replete with woodgrain, porous stone, and script components, suggest a trompe-l’œil sensibility and virtuosic mastery of formal codes. These gestures—such as the rigid lines along her protruding, hard-edged doors—harken to Smith’s earlier works, and draw on both the graphic impulses of the Chicago Imagists and the shrewd details of Domenico Gnoli. Incorporating art historical references (in this case, encrypted with masculine associations), Smith situates these modes in a feminist perspective.

Likewise, in her recent exhibition alongside the works of Magritte, Smith engaged a lineage saturated in the male gaze, and a legacy synonymous with Surrealism itself. Here, Smith presents an entryway, a passage through which the viewer may negotiate their own subjectivity.

Coinciding with this presentation, Smith will be joined in conversation with writer and editor Lauren O’Neill-Butler, on Saturday, May 10, 2025, at 4pm. RSVP is required as space is limited; please write to [email protected] to reserve your seat.

The Viewing Room series will spotlight specially curated works across media and genre by gallery artists, open to the public for a limited time. The series will continue this spring, with presentations coinciding with programming such as book signings, artist talks, and screenings, featuring artists Stefanie Heinze, James Little, Seth Price, Tschabalala Self, among others, to be announced.