Laura Smith: Illumined

Everybody is excited to present Illumined, Laura Smith’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in Tucson.

Laura Smith’s works on Dura-Lar are distinguished by their reflective and dense qualities. In them she translates negative space into black, graphite drawings. Smith begins by temporarily collaging material from past sculptural works, creating new shapes from their outer edges and negative spaces. An outline is drawn around the perimeter of the collage and guides the process thereafter. Following the outline, she carefully applies graphite inwards until the shape is complete with heavily layered material.

Intuition and methodicalness find a happy marriage in Smith’s practice. Much of her studio activity happens in between works that are paradoxically complete and perpetually in-progress. Versions are iterated on and recycled. The visual translation that Smith navigates through her works in Illumined results in a series of drawings that are hypnotizing, holographic, and puzzling.