Anne Smith
March 2-31, 2018
To Bend/To Fold
Architectural and enigmatic, the linear structures of Anne Smith’s work challenge the first glance. Their precision and economy are upset by the strange logic of their construction. Smith presents a world in which these structures exist precariously, at the edges of balance, tension and symmetry.
In her drawings, Smith inscribes silvery, graphite lines into a dense and velvety ground of charcoal. Line by line, she builds luminous structures that fit just inside the boundaries of their environment. In the large drawings, faint lines and hints of color pulsate behind the structures, alluding to the horizon or swirling patterns based on the artist’s physical reach. The tension is physical and visual: as one moves in relation to the drawings, the graphite images appear and disappear, changing with the reflection of light. From certain points of view, the linear structures embedded show brightly, while from other points they recede into the depths of their ground. The images elude stability.
Through abstraction and memory, Smith taps into what she sees as a lifelong challenge and call: to trust in uncertainty, to expand against perceived limits, and to find strength in the ability to bend.
Anne Smith (b. 1985, Syracuse, NY) is a visual artist based in Washington, DC. Her art practice spans disciplines of drawing, sculpture and printmaking to study elastic boundaries, paths, and divisions of space. Her subject matter has included her childhood home, the side of the road, and other spaces entirely made up or imagined.
Smith is a Teaching Artist at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and works in the studio of Master Printmaker Lou Stovall, from whom she learned silkscreen printmaking. In 2017, she served as Master Printmaker on a large-scale silkscreen book edition by Louis M. Schmidt at George Mason University’s Navigation Press in Fairfax, VA. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA, and the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, VA. She received an MFA from George Mason in 2015, a BA in Studio Art from Williams College, Williamstown, MA, in 2007, and has studied woodworking at the Penland School of Crafts in Bakersville, NC. Her work is included in private collections, as well as the US Department of State, Capital One and the Kala Art Institute. She is represented by Adah Rose Gallery.
