Carmen Smith: Night Swimming — Second Street Gallery

“Breezeblocks,” 2020, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches — *“Breezeblocks,”* 2020, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches

Second Street Gallery is pleased to announce Night Swimming, a solo exhibition by Carmen Smith, held in the Dové Gallery April 2 - May 21, 2021.

On Thursday, May 20, 2021 from 6-7PM, Second Street Gallery and Vitae Spirts hosted a Cocktails & Art Night with Carmen Smith, where we learned how to create a cocktail inspired by Smith’s current exhibition and took a virtual tour of the exhibition with Second Street Gallery's Executive Director & Chief Curator Kristen Chiacchia and artist Carmen Smith. You can watch the recording of the virtual event: HERE.

In Night Swimming, Carmen Smith explores how architecture and place affect emotional and psychological states, based on her belief that structures can embody experiences. Night Swimming emphasizes the nocturnal urban South Florida landscape, imagining it as a magical, otherworldly playground of glowing pools and colored buildings. Color is explored as another version of leisure, but one that exists in the mind.

Elements of otherworldliness and stillness in the paintings invite viewers to escape, as if they’re the only ones there, to somewhere between a memory and a dream. Like many of Smith’s previous works, these are not actual places, but scenes built from memories and a familiarity with typical tropical urban lines and forms. They are the structure of what is remembered, the essence of places which endure in the mind. They are not purely fantasy, as their line, form, and light suggest a real space. Yet they do not capture a scene, rather, they create one.

Carmen Smith is a visual artist based in South Florida. She is an Associate Artist at the Bakehouse Art Complex in Miami. Originally from St. Augustine, FL, she moved to Miami in 2008 after she studied fine art and design in Virginia. She holds a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond, VA, where she was awarded the Academic and Creative Excellence Award and became interested in the psychological effects of architecture and design. She is best known for her intensely colorful paintings of simplified urban architectural scenes around the greater Miami area. Characteristic of her work is an emphasis on how light and shadow play on colorful forms in the city, sometimes appearing almost abstract but never fully abandoning representation. Central to her practice is the belief that structures, like the figure in art, have emotive and intellectual influence.

Minimally executed, her paintings offer a departure from the cluttered, ever-evolving urban landscape of the greater Miami area. Instead, her paintings capture moments and fragments from the urban landscape that are often observed passively. Her use of familiar settings, designed in a way that invites the viewer to become part of them, suggests how a place becomes part of an experience. An exaggeratedly bright, almost neon, color palette suggests how we remember places within an emotional context. The result is a more nuanced consideration of how place affects experience, memory, and identity.

This exhibition is generously sponsored by Ariana & Greyson Williams.