PATRICIA SMITH

Seeing in Code

September 5th- October 5th
Reception Sat. September 6th, 4-6pm

Forgetting distance for a moment...
Looking down through the stars (as if that were possible)
And getting an eyeful of synchronicities.

- Patricia Smith

Front Room Gallery is pleased to present Seeing in Code, a solo exhibition of drawings and video by Patricia Smith that investigates the symbolic language of mapping, both real and imagined. In her latest body of work, Smith moves away from her previous investigations of cityscapes to focus on smaller towns in more natural settings, with an eye toward more than what is seen, geographically, emotionally, and psychologically. The works operate as psychic maps, intertwining built environments, celestial patterns, and natural features such as rivers and floodplains. Water recurs throughout the exhibition as a potent metaphor for the unconscious, being fluid, elusive, and always in motion, suggesting the ways in which memory, intuition, and inner states are encoded within our perception of place.

Patricia Smith's new series of drawings, Constellations, is an examination of landscape and the interplay between its human-made features and natural formations such as bodies of water and celestial bodies. Each drawing in Constellations depicts a town or village in the Hudson Valley. Smith maps the areas as seen from above, rendering details of the landscape with a delicate application of ink, colored pencil and watercolor.  Superimposed on the map is a constellation, plotted in white ink, that stands out in stark contrast from the muted colors of the landscape and the dark blue of the paper. The resulting image is a rendering of an imagined pattern of cosmic connections.

Included in the survey exhibition is an earlier series of works configured under the title, Flood Maps, which was created in Rotterdam, the Netherlands—a place where systems for the control of flooding have been developed over centuries. Two large-scale drawings and two very small-scale drawings explore the mapping of the "flood idea." A video shows Smith's sculpture of sewn-together dish towels, sponges and other absorptive materials, based on the form in the drawing, "Flood Management Study, Containment Version", being engulfed by the waves on the shore at Hoek van Holland.

Patricia Smith began exhibiting in New York in the mid-1980s, and since then has established an extensive list of international solo and group exhibitions, curatorial projects and participation in international art fairs. Her museum and institutional exhibitions include those at Brooklyn Museum, New York; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; BRIC, Brooklyn, NY; l’ESAD, Grenoble, France; Centre d'Art Contemporain de Fontaine, France; Austellungsraum Klingental, Basel, Switzerland; Housatonic Museum, Bridgeport, CT; Stedelijk Museum Aalst, Belgium; Stedelijk Museum Lier, Belgium; University of Maryland, College Park, MD; Weatherspoon Museum at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and Carlsbad Museum, NM. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, Artnet, Los Angeles Times, L Magazine and many other publications. She has received numerous awards including a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts grant, and residency awards at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and Kaus Australis in Rotterdam. She currently lives and works in Rotterdam, The Netherlands and Loudun, France. Patrica Smith is represented by the Front Room Gallery in New York, where she has had eight solo exhibitions since 2006.

Front Room Gallery, 205 Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534
Viewing Hours: Friday-Sunday 12-5PM and by appointment
Inquiries contact Kathleen Vance k@frontroom.org