LAUREL SMITH AT PEAK GALLERY
Globe and Mail | Saturday, December 15, 2007
by Gary Michael Dault
With her new exhibition, the awkwardly though cleverly named ornaminimalism, Calgary artist Laurel Smith moves decisively away from the severely lonely, horizontal,wall-mounted, semi-minimalist acrylic-on-Plexiglas lozenges she showed last time out at Peak (I call them “semi-minimalist” only because their highly clarified shapes cast succulently tinted shadows on the gallery walls, shadows that were too luscious for the astringency of minimalist proper). For this current exhibition, she has embraced - almost perversely - a dalliance with the hyper-ornamentalism of the historical Rococo style.
Smith’s horizontal Plexiglas lozenge is still there (the bigger works are made of lazercut aluminium), but now she has cut through them at some midway point and pulled the two halves apart. The cut edges are not, however clean cuts. On the contrary, the edges are fantastically ornate - a veritable hysteria of eddies and curlicues and introverted complex curves that seem to reference Rococo in its traditionally understood role as a purveyor of - as writer Christopher Willard puts it in the accompanying catalogue - “ideas of spirit, sensuous abandon, a carefree pursuit of pleasure, the fleeting nature of romantic love, and indulgent sensuality.”
So why would Smith so decisively move from the modernist clarifications of her minimalist bars of painted Plexiglas to hacking them apart, leaving behind these berserk split ends that writhe out into the gap like candy-coloured tentacles? According to Willard, Smith is neither in retreat from minimalism nor fully in the unthinking embrace of Rococo excessiveness. Her work, he suggests, “reflects more than it critiques.” All well and good, but what does it reflect and how? Mostly, I think it valorizes Smith’s skill incorporating the idea of decoration into her work. It exemplifies the way she explores how much decoration she can add before the work heaves a sigh and grows ...well, decorative. And decadent. So far, Smith has been pretty circumspect in here playing of this delicately balanced game. But she’s getting awfully close to the abyss.
about the exhibition
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