Gesture III: One Great Turning - Shinique Smith
Astrology, alchemy, mythic love poetry and the motion of the intersection on which The Greenway Wall mural stood inspired this epiphany of three performances enthused by the gesture, materials and conceptual inspirations in her work. Gesture III: One Great Turning was filmed in front of Smith’s mural Seven Moon Junction, with the use of aerial and ground videography. The performance is a manifestation of Smith’s collaborative approach to art making and showcases the breadth of her repertoire through her paintings, large-scale installations and performance based works while grounded by her personal history and influences throughout her life. “When I was a little girl I learned of the Sufi whirling dervishes, and in my innocence, I tried to dance like them. I would spin in the back yard in the hood in Baltimore until my mind was freed.” This idea was the jumping off point for Smith to create a work with dancers that would evoke and expand the mural design and its details through groups of dancers moving with hypnotic resonance. She made skirts by cutting and tying fabrics and created her own textiles from her paintings for the garments that the dancers wore. The parasol props and large swaths of silk fabric were hand painted by Smith and all were integral to the movement. The dynamic process that the KAIROS Dance Theater utilizes was a kindred to Smith’s ideas, which made for a great collaboration wherein the choreography became a mixture of improvisations prompted by Smith’s vision and excerpts from KAIROS’ superbly crafted existing work, Her.
Artist Bio
Shinique Smith is known for her monumental fabric sculptures and abstract paintings of calligraphy and collage. Born to a young fashion designer who is also a visionary thinker, Smith was exposed to an array of inspirational, childhood experiences, that include chanting with his holiness the Dalai Lama, attending the fashion shows in New York and Paris and studying ballet, piano and visual art from the age of four years. Smith attended the famed Baltimore School for the Arts, where she began honing her hand through life drawing and tagging with a local graffiti crew. Smith’s personal histories and belongings intertwine with thoughts of the vast nature of ‘things’ that we consume and discard and how these objects resonate on intimate and social scales. Over the last twenty years, Smith has gleaned visual poetry from clothing and explored concepts of ritual using breath, bunding and calligraphy as tools toward abstraction. Her layered works range from palm-sized bundled microcosms to monolithic bales to massive chaotic paintings that contain vibrant and carefully collected mementos from her life. Smith’s practice operates at the convergence of consumption and spiritual sanctuary, balancing forces and revealing connections across space and time, race, gender and place to suggest the possibility of new worlds.
