黑料不打烊

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce Paul Anthony Smith: Containment, the artist's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, to be presented from September 8 through October 13, 2018. 

Understanding one's place in a world of constructed or fabricated histories is complex and challenging. Paul Anthony Smith describes the moment of exchanging Jamaican for American citizenship as revelatory鈥攁 sense of belonging to both cultures and neither. Containment finds the artist exploring the constructive nature of memory as it relates to his perception as a Jamaican-American. His work underscores his connection to this heritage and considers how experiences between places and cultures are represented. Smith's commitment to creating images as a means to navigate this space is not without irreverence towards a medium often mistaken as a stand in for truth.

Containment includes new selections from two ongoing bodies of work and incorporates photographs taken of people鈥攆amily, friends, and strangers鈥攐f the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, socializing in a variety of public spaces in Jamaica, Brooklyn and Puerto Rico. In his picotage works, Smith picks into the surface of a printed photograph with a sharp tool to produce prismatic geometries employing diamond, stripe, and triangle patterns. These surface disruptions grow out of earlier works referencing African masks and affectively create analog time-stamps with distance and space between the anonymity of the figures and patterns.