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“Smith’s fascination with Victorian nature drawing and illustration often leads to work that is graphic and mannered, and this is especially true of the work presented in Feminine Contexts. “Born” (2002) is a double self-portrait as Little Red Ridinghood and her grandmother being disgorged from the wolf’s split open belly, and in the more dynamic “Pool of Tears (After Lewis Caroll)” (2000) Alice is fleeing a menagerie of owls, swans, and rats across a shallow lake: both of these pieces illustrate alternative literary readings rather than enact more immediate and volatile meanings.
In “Trinity of Heaven and Earth” (2000), there is a half girl, half horse, a girl with angelic butterfly wings, and a girl weeping in the forest, and the portraits in “Blue Prints”(1999)— especially “Wolf Girl,” “Virgin with Dove,” and “Melancholia”— are eerie and unsettling. Yet Feminine Contexts leaves one with troubling questions. In order to think about femininity specifically, is it important or even useful to appeal to the female characters in fairy tales and the style of old illustrated books? Doesn’t this lead immediately into nostalgic cliché? Don’t tongues, anuses, intestines, wombs, hair, and nipples offer richer possibilities for thinking about the feminine than iconic animals and fairy tales, if only because they don’t assume the whole narrative of gender as a premise?”
By Daniel Baird
2000
Etching and aquatint on Hahnemühle laid paper, with full margins
121,5 x 90,8 cm; sheet: 148 x 112 cm
Signed, dated and numbered in pencil 20/24 from edition of 24
Published by Thirteen Moons, New York
Literature: Wendy Weitman 135
2000
Aguafuerte y aguantinta sobre cartón Hahnemühle, con márgenes completos
121,5 x 90,8 cm; papel: 148 x 112 cm
Firmado, fechado y numerado a mano 20/24 de una edición de 24
Publica: Thirteen Moons, New York
Bibliografía: Wendy Weitman 135
