Details:
① Artwork:
Polar Sky
In this painting, light pink clouds hover almost imperceptibly within a pale blue sky. Inside the artist’s cloud shapes, dollops of paint swirl and shift within their own little pools, allowing for happy accidents along their borders.
There is a feeling of suspension in Krista Louis Smith’s cloud paintings. Her palette of pale milkshake pinks and French cream whites soothe the senses with slight variations that physically absorb one’s gaze. Through the use of semi-transparent veils of oil paint, her barely noticeable shapes are about feelings of healing and escape, offering peaceful womblike associations. With a quiet sense of calm, Smith’s paintings are not merely meant to be viewed but also felt.
Specs:
③ Artist:
In her Wildflower series — an installation of 40 ceramic works the artist displayed together as a garden of carnivorous plants — Krista Louise Smith elicits the notion of femininity fighting back. A feeling of women becoming hunters instead of prey prevails in this series of unique, toothed, round ceramic vessels. They hint at Smith’s core awareness of female resilience, strength, and courage but also an entrenched yet repressed rage.
Krista Louise Smith was born in 1986 in Ontario, Canada, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from OCAD University in Toronto, Canada (2010) and her MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art (2014).
Her work has been exhibited at Carvalho Park in Brooklyn, NY; Half Gallery in New York City, NY; Nicodim Gallery in Bucharest, Romania; Andrea Festa Fine Art in Rome, Italy; and the Southampton Art Center in Southampton, NY.
Smith has participated in residencies at the Leipzig International Artist in Residence in Leipzig, Germany; the Byrdcliffe Artist Colony in Woodstock, NY; and at the Art Students League Residency at VYT in Sparkhill, New York.
She is also a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation for the Arts Grant and won the Ruth Katzman Prize.