Mark R. Smith’s Stress Formations features new textile paintings and laser engravings that expand on the artist’s interest in social networks and structures, and the physical organization of crowds.
In Stress Formations, Smith considers the collective weight the events of the past few years have had on all of us and what he sees as a fascinating contrast between what people were doing privately at home to cope with stress—by picking up handicrafts like lacemaking, crocheting and knitting—versus the mass events that were unfolding in public, such as the civic unrest following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and adjacently, the January 6th Capitol riot. Smith’s works on view plumb the tension between social cohesion and division through a careful interplay of materials and forms.
The exhibition features a large fabric painting evoking the shape of a tent or a beehive, with each striped, glowing orange or yellow fabric square growing progressively larger from top to bottom. In this work Smith questions who is included in the safe, collective shelter of the big tent. Nearby, smaller works combine laser engraved crocheted doilies with cutout figures from newspapers like the New York Times, arranged to echo the form of the lacework: Smith’s attempt at organizing the unruly.
In a final, large-scale work Smith revisits his interest in Elias Canetti’s pivotal 1960 book, Crowds and Power, a poetic treatise on crowd dynamics centered on the notion of touch as a driving mechanism. Here, in fabric collaged with laser cut figures in simple formations, Smith creates different patterns based on the eleven crowd symbols identified by Canetti: sea, rain, fire, rivers, forest, corn, wind, the heap, stone heaps, sand, and treasure. Though Smith’s new works reflect on the social and political upheaval of the last few years, his engagement with Canetti offers hope that the solution to our collective angst lies in togetherness.
In Stress Formations, Smith considers the collective weight the events of the past few years have had on all of us and what he sees as a fascinating contrast between what people were doing privately at home to cope with stress—by picking up handicrafts like lacemaking, crocheting and knitting—versus the mass events that were unfolding in public, such as the civic unrest following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and adjacently, the January 6th Capitol riot. Smith’s works on view plumb the tension between social cohesion and division through a careful interplay of materials and forms.
The exhibition features a large fabric painting evoking the shape of a tent or a beehive, with each striped, glowing orange or yellow fabric square growing progressively larger from top to bottom. In this work Smith questions who is included in the safe, collective shelter of the big tent. Nearby, smaller works combine laser engraved crocheted doilies with cutout figures from newspapers like the New York Times, arranged to echo the form of the lacework: Smith’s attempt at organizing the unruly.
In a final, large-scale work Smith revisits his interest in Elias Canetti’s pivotal 1960 book, Crowds and Power, a poetic treatise on crowd dynamics centered on the notion of touch as a driving mechanism. Here, in fabric collaged with laser cut figures in simple formations, Smith creates different patterns based on the eleven crowd symbols identified by Canetti: sea, rain, fire, rivers, forest, corn, wind, the heap, stone heaps, sand, and treasure. Though Smith’s new works reflect on the social and political upheaval of the last few years, his engagement with Canetti offers hope that the solution to our collective angst lies in togetherness.
