Emma Smith: A smuggler’s trade, your skins and fat for my marching armies
February 28 - April 9, 2017
Little Gallery
Melt Pond (2016), Oil on canvas
Photo: William Bardebes
Emma Smith was born in Auckland in 1975. She holds an MFA from Elam University of Auckland, 2005, and has exhibited extensively in New Zealand and in London. Smith’s paintings have variously dealt with notions of debt and reparation, restructures and the qualities of specific sites as a kind of muse for the violence and upheaval of change, occupation and neglect.
A Smuggler’s Trade, your skins and fat for my marching armies fuses imagined sites and actual places with notions of success and failure, un/healthy competition, survival. In the cool night light, strange walls of foliage become barriers, confidence courses appear militaristic and unsafe, golf flags testify to more territorial intent than a Sunday game, tent like structures are propped up for makeshift housing, and looming overpasses forfeit notions of arrival in their incomplete states.