Alumna Emily Mae Smith ‘06 in Solo Exhibition at Le Consortium
Alumna Emily Mae Smith '06 is in a solo exhibition with Le Consortium, their first ever institutional exhibition devoted to the artist. Running through April 14, 2019 at Le Consortium in Dijon, France, the exhibition gathers over 40 pieces made between 2014 and 2018 to present in one retrospective.
Smith’s work draws on many different influences including the Chicago Imagists from the 1960s, Surrealism, Pop Art, and Art Nouveau. Accroding to Le Consortium, her oevre “impose[s] pictorial universes for which we are unprepared; they catch us by surprise by moving the debate someplace else entirely, to a place where we’re not yet, where it will be novel to go. For this they need a lot of courage, patience, and also perseverance, to oppose common taste in an era of smooth, facile careers.”
Included in the exhibition is her Studio series, which borrows its title from the British magazine founded in 1893 and published until 1964. She uses many different stylistic elements included in the magazine, and according to Le Consortium, she “unrolls a visual vocabulary made of stilettos, teeth, candles, eyeglasses, and a whole bunch of unexpected artifacts articulating little, esoteric fairy tales where the question of gender always lies beneath the surface. Dizzyingly high stilettos echo dizzyingly large mustaches, which in the composition are integrated within a frame painted on the canvas, as if it predicated a mock masculinity.”
According to Simone Subal Gallery, “Emily Mae Smith was born in 1979 in Austin Texas. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include: The Sphinx or The Caress, Simone Subal Gallery, New York, NY (2017); Tesla Girls, Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, Belgium (2016); Honest Espionage, Mary Mary. Glasgow, Scotland, UK (2016); Medusa, Laurel Gitlen. New York, NY (2015). Select group exhibitions include Pharmacy for Idiots, Rob Tufnell and Tanya Leighton, Köln, Germany (2017); Women to the Front, Works from the Miller Meigs Collection, Lumber Room, Portland, OR (2017); QATRIÈME SEXE, Indéfinition des genres, réaffirmation des plaisirs, curated by Marie Maertens, Le Coeur. Paris, France (2017); Scarlet Street, Lucien Terras. New York, NY (2016); Me, Myself, I, China Art Objects Galleries. Los Angeles, CA (2016); Surrreal, König Galerie (St. Agnes). Berlin, Germany (2016); Untitled Body Parts, Simone Subal Gallery. New York, NY (2016); Six Advertisements, Marlborough Chelsea. New York, NY (2015); Unrealism, organized by Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian, The Moore Building. Miami, FL (2015); Mrs. Benway, Fourteen30 Contemporary. Portland, OR (2015); I Dropped the Lemon Tart, Lisa Cooley. New York, NY (2015); Parallax Futured: Transtemporal Subjectivities, Skirball Museum. Cincinnati, OH (2014).”