Featuring his singular pictoage on pigment prints, Paul Anthony Smith's latest exhibition, Tradewinds, at Jack Shainman Gallery explores the artist's Caribbean lineage and the legacies inherited throughout generations. Largely departing from his use of fence, breeze block, and brick overlays, Smith’s picotage patterning in this new series is rendered far more ambiguous and organic.
Considering both his own familiar histories, along with the global impact of this past year’s pandemic and racial justice uprising, Smith questions the stories that are told about people’s lives and deaths. Why were those of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor rendered infinitely more significant after they left this earth; and how do we intentionally celebrate and actively see humanity while we are still here? The personal memories that Smith captures with his lens are figuratively transformed through the very physical act of picking, serving as a kind of closure over grief as well as an understanding of the nature of things to come.
