The surreal, humorous figurations of Brooklyn-based artist Emily Mae Smith bring a feminist perspective to art history with a twist. Iconography and symbols are recovered, while timeframes are collapsed through a blend of Pop art, Art Nouveau, and Surrealism.
Read MoreBorn in 1979 in Austin, Texas, Emily Mae Smith completed a BFA in studio art at the University of Texas in 2002. In 2004, Smith moved to New York upon receiving a scholarship from Columbia University, and graduated with an MFA in 2006.
Smith's wry figurations contend with gender, class, and violence by recovering popular signs and symbols to explore her experience of being a woman artist.
Among the recurring symbols in Smith's work is an anthropomorphic broom character that references the painter's brush, the phallus, and domestic labour. Inspired by the bewitched broomsticks in the Disney animation Fantasia (1940), Smith's character points towards the labour she undertakes to fund her painting practice.
Bound to what the artist identifies as 'phallocentric myths of authenticity and creation', Smith's broom character is often deployed to communicate her experience of being female, or of being a female artist. In the oil on linen painting The Riddle (2017), a standing broom figure holding a large paintbrush is seen to converse with a stone statue in front of a grotto.
The broom figure takes on many roles in Smith's compositions, reflecting the notion of agency and self-creation. A wide-mouthed broomstick-headed Medusa is shown to bare teeth in Medusa (2019), suggestive of the dismissal of displays of emotion in women. In Study of the Studio (Speculative Objects) (2021), a broomstick figure is seen sitting contemplatively in the studio, surrounded by symbolic objects including a skull, books, and burning candles.
In 2018, Smith presented a major solo exhibition at the Consortium Museum in Dijon, featuring paintings from 'The Studio' series. Referencing the historic British magazine The Studio, Smith's paintings featured a vibrant display of broom characters adorned with traditionally female signs of candy, sunglasses, stilettos, and teeth. The works were seen to borrow from the magazine's compositional elements and typeface, while potentially referencing historical painting tropes such as Sigmar Polke's 1968 herons or Gerhard Richter's candles—presenting a contemporary revisitation of design and painting traditions.
In 2021, Smith presented the solo exhibition Harvesters at Perrotin, Paris, in which her broom character appears to have been transported to medieval times—whether seated in wheat fields (Harvester, 2021), dressed as a scholar poring over a book (The Alchemist, 2021), or dipping a brush in a pool of ink (The Grotto, 2021).
Exploring the relationship between labour and pictorial representation, Harvesters could be seen to disrupt historical depictions of women as idle figures or domestic labourers, by reproducing such scenes with a genderless broom figure.
Emily Mae Smith's works have been shown widely in Asia, Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Solo exhibitions include Petzel, New York (2022); Harvesters, Perrotin, Paris (2021); Speculative Objects, Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels (2021); Kin, Simone Subal Gallery, New York (2020); Feast and Famine, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2020); Ex Libris, Rockefeller Arts Center, New York (2020); Avalon, Perrotin, Toyko (2019).
Group exhibitions include Sausage Party, Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels (2022); Put it this Way, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington (2022); Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2022); The Dreamers, 58th October Salon, Belgrade Biennale (2021); Alphabetic Image, Arsenal Contemporary, New York (2021); TITLE TBD, Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland (2020); Art on the Grid, Public Art Fund, New York (2020).
Emily Mae Smith's Instagram can be found here.
Elaine YJ Zheng | Ocula | 2022
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