After successful solo shows in Glasgow and New York, and taking part in major group showings in Los Angeles, New York and Miami, Emily Mae Smith will be having her first solo show at the Rodolphe Janssen gallery in Brussels. We're excited to share with you couple of peeks at what she worked on for "Tesla Girls" that will open on 13th of October.
Round glasses, sharp hairdos, brooms/brushes, mustache, guns, water drops and hooks, are some of the recurring images we've seen previously in works by Austin-born artist. With her new body of work, Emily Mae Smith brings most of these elements back, but in different interactions and telling different stories. Though very pop-art at first, her meticulously rendered oils feature strong surrealist and even Disney-like iconography. But behind the rich layers of vibrant colors and sharp imagery, visual wit and dark humor reveals her cheeky commentary on issues like gender, capitalism and violence. Unusual mixture of cartoon-like elements against photo realistic imagery and even digital graphic effects, creates an unique aesthetic wrapped in carefully constructed and strict compositions. Her Brussels debut is titled after Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel "The Prestige" in which Nikola Tesla builds a flawed teleportation machine that merely creates a duplicate of the original item or person. For this show Smith painted a new series of recognizable female portraits that are her vision of such accidental duplicate mistakes. Stripped of any recognizable features, they are representing women whose "interiority, subjectivity, and psychology is completely absent as a visual language in western culture.” -Sasha Bogojev
Photo credit by the artist
