Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art presented Searching, a solo exhibition of works by artist Paul Anthony Smith (Jamaican, born 1988), an alumnus of Kansas City Art Institute (BFA 2010). This selection of Smith’s works—well-known picotage photographic works featuring individuals and groups of people, and recent painted landscapes viewed through a fence motif—resonates with concepts of access and vulnerability. In part, the exhibition celebrated Smith’s ten years of implementing picotage, a process whereby he uses sharp tools to stipple the surfaces of photographs in specific patterns and in select areas.
Photographed in Jamaica, where the artist was born, and New York City, where he lives and works, these works demonstrate Smith’s longstanding exploration of the concept of hybrid identity. The picotage images—the picking away at the image and individual and at the same time adding to it—explore the layers and meditations on the complexities and multivalent spaces of social and cultural identity in the Caribbean. Smith picks geometric patterns on the faces of the individuals, referencing late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Kuba masks from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He layers this imagery with triangular motifs found in several Caribbean nations’ flags.
The exhibition included Smith’s recent Dreams Deferred and Centering the Periphery series, where he employs a narrow depth of field showing views of tropical beaches and park landscapes obscured by the blurred geometric pattern of chain link fencing. Like masking the figures, the fence alludes to barriers that socially, culturally, and physically obfuscate the image, creating tension and calling into question notions of the image and its representations as “truth.” When considered together, the photographic series points to insights on Smith’s ongoing meditations on memories, retracing routes, centering, access, and vulnerability that connect to an overarching notion of searching.
Erin Dziedzic 