about
These drawings are immersive, sprawling out onto the wall like a stage before an audience. Smith approaches the paper itself like a staged performance, choreographing actors within hyper-detailed settings that construct narratives exploring universal themes of hardship, change, temptation, and creation that are inherent to the human condition. The result is a photorealistic scene filled with the energetic movement of motorcycle riders, crashed cars, and blowing foliage achieved through stark contrast and strategic shading. Often, Smith includes groupings of curving lines that look similar to tree rings, producing the effect of a camera lens coming into focus. Viewers are directed to the focal point through optical signals achieved through Smith’s formulating shadows and light out of graphite. The compositions are epic in scale and precise in detail, elevating graphite as a medium to the level of painting while compensating for what it lacks. Both graphite and drawing have long been reserved for loose sketch work in preparation for a painting, but Smith uses them in a way that supersedes painting’s ability. The smaller instrument allows Smith to include detailed minutiae covering every centimeter of the paper. Smith works on the entirety of a drawing at once, first building up larger forms and shapes and reserving the smaller refined details for last. Many of Smith’s works are larger than life, reaching up to 5.5x9.5 ft., making her creative process an intensely physical one.
But Smith’s practice is as equally mental as it is physical. While moving around and drawing on the paper, she is grappling with internal experiences and personal changes, such as the birth of her first child. According to Smith, her drawings are artifacts of her process of processing. In her recent work, Smith looks to grass in the landscape as a motif for meditation. According to the artist, at the beginning of the pandemic she established a habit of going on evening walks in her neighborhood, during which she noticed the way her neighbors’ usually well-kept yards were growing out and reclaiming their natural growth patterns. This prompted Smith’s interest in nature’s regenerative cycles, enduring without regard to human activities, and thriving when such activities cease. Graphite is inherently buildable, making it a suitable medium for contemplating human effects in nature because, like the landscape, graphite drawings contain remnants of what’s been erased and drawn over, leaving traces of Smith’s creative process like a worn trail in a field.
While working, Smith emotionally responds to visual and auditory cues as she often listens to audiobooks during her practice. Upon hearing a line that particularly resonates, she’ll write it on the paper before continuing to draw, leaving the words to get lost among the hundreds of grass blades she’s busy rendering. In doing so, Smith’s drawings are made from the burying of present moments and serve as metaphors for how the land bears indexes of past and present interactions, whether it be a tire track left from a motorcycle or a bed of pressed grass where a mother laid with her baby. Smith imbues these drawings with visual syntax, using the figuration as language and flecks of color as tone to prompt viewers’ consideration of past, present, and future exchanges that take place in outdoor settings.
While drawing, Smith imagines viewers’ individual experiences with the work. While immersed in visual information, viewers become lost in a moment of contemplation held in suspension between chaos and stillness. Gazing into an endless sea of foliage humbly reminds us that we are no more important than a blade of grass. While the land is molded by our presence, it nonetheless persists with a force that outweighs the strength and outlives the mortality, of mankind. Within the grand scheme of nature’s forces, everything on earth holds a valuable role while simultaneously lacking any valuable significance. Smith’s work reminds us that though the world may be everything to us, to the world we are nothing but a bystander to its regenerative processes that ruthlessly seek equilibrium.
About the artist.
Rachel Wolfson Smith is a Maryland-born artist who holds a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in Painting from Indiana University. After working as an Assistant Instructor at Indiana University Bloomington and as an Assistant Professor at Western Oregon University, Smith lived and worked as a full-time artist in Austin, TX for five years. She currently resides in Amsterdam, NL with her husband and son.
Smith has exhibited her work at the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art in Rancho Cucamonga, California, The NeueHouse in New York, Liliana Bloch Gallery in Dallas, Texas, and The Contemporary Austin in Austin, Texas. She has participated in artist residencies internationally and nationally, and is an alumna from The Contemporary Austin’s Crit Group and Corsicana’s 100W Artist and Writer Residency. Smith has been awarded grant support from The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, The Awesome Foundation, and the City of Austin. Though her formal training was rooted in oil paint, she has become best-known for large-scale graphite drawings that explore themes of permanence and ephemerality, movement and time, and human relationships to the landscape.
Text written by Caroline Frost, courtesy of Ivester Contemporary
Video and score by Richard Carpenter of Storyminute