Alexandria Smith’s futurist cosmos at the Gagosian Gallery

Alexandria Smith’s futurist cosmos at the Gagosian Gallery Alexandria Smith — Libations for soul wares — 2022 From 28 April to 4 June 2022, the Gagosian Gallery New York presents “Pretend Gravitas and Dream Aborted Givens”, an exhibition of the work of American artist Alexandria Smith. Source: Gagosian Gallery · Image: Alexandria Smith, “Libations for soul wares”, 2022, mixed media on three-dimensional wood assemblage, 60 × 48 inches, (152.4 × 121.9 cm) © Alexandria Smith The title of the exhibition, “Pretend Gravitas and Dream Aborted Givens”, refers to an essay by the recently deceased writer and journalist Greg Tate, whom Alexandria Smith considers her mentor. As the Gagosian Gallery notes in a press release, Tate wrote that Smith’s characters seem to “identify totally with the need for all ghosts, freaks, and spooks to make peace with the everyday realms of the mundane and the quotidian. The unmagic realism of it all. The ghost world of grownfolks with its dull grey-areas, pretend gravitas, and dream-aborting givens”. “Theatrical and metaphysical, the paintings and drawings incorporate forces of creation, destruction, and transmutation across interconnected planes of existence”, the press note explains. “Doors and windows link proscenium arches, paneled walls, columns, and other architectural components with primordial and celestial landscapes composed of vibrant pigments, glitter, and three-dimensional forms that begin to extend out into the viewer’s space. Dueling elemental forces occupy these scenes in the forms of billowing clouds, growing tendrils, erupting volcanoes, and cleansing waves. Smith’s hybrid figures are also in constant flux as polymorphic amalgams of body parts; ambiguously gendered, they stretch, divide, and redouble within the compositions. Flanking the margins of these utopian spaces and melding with them, her protagonists bear witness and take action, embodying transformation and growth”. “This work is a display of futurist thinking, imagining other worlds not tethered to the past or present, in which magic, tenderness, and liberation happen”, Smith explains. “Since we don’t feel in a linear fashion, why can’t that concept manifest in another world, translating real-life experiences into an imagined landscape that welcomes hybridity and difference? What might it look like to conjure a dream within this painted realm?” #2022 #GagosianGallery #theartwolf