Sarah Stefana Smith: Willful Matters

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GALLERY GUIDE

Flag to the Abyss No. 3, 2022

INTRODUCTION

In Willful Matters, interdisciplinary visual artist and scholar Sarah Stefana Smith combines materiality, aesthetics, Black art and culture, and queer theory in two recent bodies of work that interrogate identity, Flag to the Abyss and Asymmetries/Symmetries. Through imagery that is both provocative and contemplative, Smith challenges viewers to consider these intersecting ideas and how the lines of demarcation around difference—race, gender, or sexuality—are used to constitute and establish belonging.

Using cotton, plastic, netting, fiberglass screen, and thread, Smith interrogates meaning through the possibilities of materials in her series of textile-based weavings, Flag to the Abyss. As the artist explores the tension between the definable and opaque, the familiar and the abstract, they employ photography and sculptural works on paper in Symmetries/Asymmetries to reflect on the formal relationships between light, shadow, line, and form.

Resisting transparency, and striving to express the boundless opacity of the marginalized subject, Smith engages viewers in Willful Matters to consider the relationship of these ideas within the context of Black and queer identity.

Asymmetries No. 4 or Symmetries/Asymmetries No. 9, 2021, BCA Center

CLOCKWISE FROM GALLERY ENTRANCE

ASYMMETRIES NO. 5 OR

SYMMETRIES/ASYMMETRIES NO. 10, 2023 fiberglass screening, thread, plastic, graphite, acrylic on black Stonehenge paper

22 x 30"

ASYMMETRIES NO. 6 OR

SYMMETRIES/ASYMMETRIES NO. 11, 2021 fiberglass screening, thread, plastic, graphite, acrylic on polar white Stonehenge paper

22 x 30"

UNTITLED SKETCH (NO. 12), circa 2019 archival photographs, graphite, ink, acrylic paint, fiberglass screen, netting, adhesive

9 x 12"

SYMMETRIES/ASYMMETRIES NO. 3, 2020 black and white archival pigment print ed. 2 of 3

11 x 14"

SYMMETRIES/ASYMMETRIES NO. 4, 2020 black and white archival pigment print, ed. 2 of 3

11 x 14"

FLAG TO THE ABYSS NO. 1, 2020 thread, bird netting, fiberglass screening, Paracord, spray paint, plastic

70 x 63 x 7.5"

ASYMMETRIES NO. 4 OR SYMMETRIES/ASYMMETRIES NO. 9, 2021 fiberglass screening, thread, plastic, graphite, acrylic on black Stonehenge paper

22 x 30"

FLAG TO THE ABYSS NO. 2, 2023 thread, bird netting, fiberglass screening, Paracord, spray paint, plastic

79.5 x 32 x 7.5”

ASYMMETRIES NO. 3 OR SYMMETRIES/ASYMMETRIES NO. 8, 2021-22 fiberglass screening, thread, plastic, graphite, acrylic on polar white Stonehenge paper

22 x 30"

ASYMMETRIES NO. 1 OR SYMMETRIES/ASYMMETRIES NO. 6, 2021 fiberglass screening, thread, plastic, graphite, acrylic on black Stonehenge paper

22 x 30"

UNTITLED (NO. 11), c. 2019 collaged drawings

8.5 x 11"

UNTITLED (NO. 10), c. 2019 collaged drawings

8.5 x 11"

FLAG TO THE ABYSS NO. 4, 2023 thread, bird netting, fiberglass screening, Paracord, spray paint

66 x 46 x 6.5"

HANGING

FLAG TO THE ABYSS NO. 3, 2022 thread, bird netting, fiberglass screening, Paracord, spray paint, plastic

71 x 52 x 5"

All works courtesy of the artist. Price upon request
Flag to the
No. 4
2023,
Center
Abyss
,
BCA

ARTIST STATEMENT

Willful Matters proposes an alternative scene of encounter for Black life forms*, through a theory of the abyss and dark matter that is remixed through the creation of textile—based weavings and sculptural drawings. Drawing on the ideas of Evelyn Hammonds—Black feminist scholar of the history of science, and Edouard Glissant—Caribbeanist scholar who writes extensively about post-colonial subjects, the show combines two bodies of work, Flag to the Abyss (2020-2023) and Symmetries/Asymmetries (2021-23).

I contend with the following questions and preoccupations: what can or do, materials do? How do materials and matter, matter? Can materials harness a willful opacity for Black life forms/Black femme configurations? My interest in the scholarship of Glissant and Hammonds is two-fold, I am interested in what might be made possible about Black life (Black femme life) through a collision with the inscrutable, and if in such resistance to transparency might other world building possibilities reveal themselves.

Flag to the Abyss (2020) is an inquiry into the premise what can materials do? How do materials, and matter, matter? What can opacity offer the marginalized? A flag denotes a clear location, while an abyss is an expansive chasm with no clear boundary. In Caribbeanist thinker Edouard Glissant’s hands, the abyss—an unreachable space at the bottom of the ocean— configures a right for the marginalized subject to be opaque, rather than legible, as a form of resistance. My interest in this engagement is how such a premise suggests the ways Black artists, Black cultural producers exceed categorization. These flags then bring together a variety of materials, cotton, plastic, netting, fiberglass screen and thread, in an attempt to hold the tension of definable/legible and opaque. Additionally, the materials have utilitarian functions that when put together are transformed.

The series Symmetries/Asymmetries (2020-Present) uses photography and sculptural works-on-paper to reflect on light and shadow, line and form. Using these more formal characteristics of art making, through collaged components that attempt to toe-the-line between symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships between elements. The photographs in the series

*”Black life form” is a term taken from Rinaldo Walcott’s The Long Emancipation

capture symmetries through overlapping imagery in a two-dimensional plane. I see the works-on-paper, similarly playing with relational space and place, transition and ambiguity, through abstraction. Ultimately, the workson-paper and photographs that make up Symmetries/Asymmetries considers the process of orienting bodies, lines, and objects; oriented through liminality, and in excess.

BIOGRAPHY

SARAH STEFANA SMITH (b. 1982, Brooklyn, New York, raised Columbia, Maryland) aesthetically and critically contributes to discourses on black culture, queer theory, affect studies, and visual and aesthetic representation. Smith’s work has been exhibited or shown at the Arlington Art Center, VA; DC Art Center, Washington, D.C.; Borland Project Space, Penn State, PA; Gallery CA, Baltimore, MD; and the twenty-year retrospective of A Different Eye: Sistagraphy Celebrates 20 Years of Photography, an Atlanta-based photography collective of African American women. They have published in The Black Scholar Journal, Women & Performance, Drain Journal of Art and Culture, The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts Education and in Ruptures: Anti-colonial and Anti-Racist Feminist Theorizing.

Smith has participated in numerous residences including Creativities Project, University of Pittsburgh, PA; Merriweather District AIR, Columbia, MD; 77Arts, Rutland, VT; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Amherst, and the Vermont Studio Center. They received their PhD in Social Justice Education, University of Toronto, Canada; an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Goddard College, VT; and a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College, GA. Currently, Smith is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College, MA, lecturing on gender and visual culture, transnational feminism, and Black art and culture.

Sarah Stefana Smith

FURTHER SUGGESTED READING AND LITERATURE REVIEW

Glissant, É., & Wing, B. (1997). Poetics of Relation. University of Michigan Press.

Hammonds, E. (1994). Black (w)holes and the geometry of Black female sexuality. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 6(2–3).

Nash, J. C. (2020). Black Feminine Enigmas, or Notes on the Politics of Black Feminist Theory. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 45(3), 519–523.

Roach, S. (2020). (Re)turning to “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women”: A Black Feminist Forum on the Culture of Dissemblance. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 45(3), 515–519.

Walcott, Rinaldo. (2021). The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom. Duke University Press.

Wright, M. M. (2015). Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. University of Minnesota Press.

RELATED PROGRAMS

A CONVERSATION WITH SARAH STEFANA SMITH

Wednesday, March 8, 6pm BCA Center, Second floor

FAMILY ART SATURDAY

Saturday, March 25, 2023, 11am – 1pm BCA Center, Fourth Floor

GALLERY EXPLORERS: MIXED MEDIA MAGIC

Monday – Friday, April 24-28, 2023

Noon-3pm, BCA Center, ages 9-11

135 CHURCH STREET, BURLINGTON, VERMONT, 05401 BURLINGTONCITYARTS.ORG
Sarah Stefana Smith: Willful Matters is sponsored by The Maslow Family Foundation. Hospitality sponsors, Lake Champlain Chocolates, Farrell Distributing, and Prophecy Wines. Burlington City Arts is supported in part by The Vermont Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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