Exhibition Archive 2022: Kiki Smith and I...,"Lesson in Self-acceptance"

KIKI SMITH

18 October 2022–12 November 2022

211 West 19th Street, New York

"Dancing in Dia:Beacon"

Natsumi Goldfish, Mixed Media Photography, 2022

2-11-2022

One Sunday in late November, I had the opportunity to make a day trip by myself to Dia:Beacon which I had always wanted to do. This time I went to see the museum but also for research for my new work in the near future. It was a perfect quiet, misty and later rainy day for me to spend enough time to absorb things I needed.

I have been thinking about my work and my art, who I am, what I have, what I am given, what I can share as a human. I am trying to back to basics, as well as to expand and cultivate it. 

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11-12-2022

While I still have many things I would like to get done this year, I have been thinking about what I would be able to create next year in 2023. I would be spending even more time in the studio to create works next year and I am very excited to see what I will be able to share with the world.

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5-11-2022

This past Thursday on November 1st, I stopped by at Timothy Taylor gallery in Chelsea to see a show of Kiki Smith. When I moved to NYC there were two artists I wanted to apply to be a studio assistant. One of them was Kiki Smith. There, I also heard that Timothy Taylor gallery will be moving to..., I think she said Tribeca (might be soho, I'm sorry my bad memory I am writing this from memory of one month ago)

She was the first artist someone else suggested/introduced me to look at her work, instead of me finding artists. It was when I was still in Tokyo. I had a little wish to work under her as an art assistant. Because of my foreign status here, I needed to spend all my time finding a place that would support my stay here, it was not possible for me to do any of these under an artist. 
In the end I didn't work under any artist that time(except for a very short period I worked for a Japanese textile artist as studio assistant before finding my visa sponsor) and until today, and I am not planning to do so in any future.

There is a documentary that features about 5 female artists working in NYC that I like. One of them is Kiki Smith. Recently I thought of this documentary because one of the artists included in it has passed away.., but the documentary was a very nice one and I would like to watch it again sometime soon.

I like the fact that she works on different mediums and experiments different effects and textures but still remains working on hands. 

Untitled(Bones) 1993

Untitled (Hair) 1990

Untitled, (Head with Coins) 1998

There is always quietness and silence in her work before pain even these sculptures that if happened in real life will be a painful experience. 

I think it is Kiki Smith's early work's one characteristic that she let this happen: how this sculpture is leaning and it almost looks like my camera is distorting the image but it is sculpture itself.

 

Dead Birds (Maybe they are crows for the size, but I lost the list of art sheet)

Dead birds are something Kiki Smith and I share attachment and an interest in, but I wonder if the way we see them or the reason/aspects we are interested in them are the same. We grew up in different backgrounds, surrounded by different cultures and beliefs, different countries and different experiences with birds and stories we probably heard about birds growing up. But birds are birds, and dead birds are dead birds that share the same nature they carry as birds in any place we live. 

Unfortunately I ruined the paper I brough home so this is only picture I took from them. 

---Below is Official Texts from Timothy Taylor----

Timothy Taylor is pleased to present an exhibition of works by the American artist Kiki Smith focusing on sculpture, drawing, collage, and wall works from the 1990s that draw together Smith’s study of the human body and the natural world. The exhibition is presented in a temporary exhibition space at 211 West 19th Street in Chelsea, while the gallery renovates a new 6,000-square-foot gallery in Tribeca that will open next year. The exhibition will be accompanied by text written by Lumi Tan, Senior Curator at the Kitchen.

Sculpting, painting, and weaving the human and animal form in a variety of mediums, Smith has long been interested in our most basic relation to the world we live in. How do we live with our mortality, she asks, and how is our experience influenced by the religious, environmental and social structures around us?

The works in this exhibition exhume the body from its battlegrounds: angry spirits inspired by Greek myths stand with Eve-like bronze women; poisoned birds fallen from the sky. Directly and without rhetoric, Smith’s work exposes our core: emblems of primal loss, sexuality and birth that suggest our unchanging nature over the millennia.

-Timthy Taylor Gallery

Going Back to the ’90s With the Artist Kiki Smith, Kiki Smith, 18 October – 12 November 2022, The New York Times
When Kiki Smith saw the collection of her own work from the 1990s put together by Timothy Taylor gallery for a retrospective, she experienced what she called a “lesson in self-acceptance.” The artist had spent the decade mourning those taken by AIDS, including her sister, Bebe, and filling her days with work. “A lot of the time you’re making things because you have weird little niches of interest. All of them are made out of some sort of strange earnestness, in moments of trying to discover,” Smith said. She had been trying to discover in what seems like every medium: drawings and lithographs; ceramics, bronze and papier-mâché; and even photography, including a famous self-portrait snapped with a camera designed for geological surveys (“My Blue Lake,” 1994). But as Smith, now 68, looked over what had felt, at the time, like a variety of disparate discoveries, she saw a through line: “There are a lot of heads, and a lot of birds.” The heads include “Untitled (Ear Ache)” (1991), a papier-mâché that reveals Smith’s obsession with the grosser aspects of our bodies and influenced the direction of figurative art, while the glowering head in “Las Animas” (1997), a collage of photographs she took of her own veins and scars, shows her unflagging feminist stance. The birds include a bronze series of mythical creatures in “Harpies” (2000), and the moving “Six Crows” (1995), in which dark bronze crows are strewn across a gallery floor, apparently felled in midflight. It seems to speak both to AIDS and to Covid-19 though, Smith clarifies, that wasn’t why she made them. Not that it matters: “It makes me have faith in my work: that I just follow and go where it goes.”