ARTIST STATEMENT
The way that I think and the way I develop paintings might qualify as an obsession to know more by organizing what is already known in new ways. What excites me most about painting is its unique ability to elicit simultaneous experiences from a still object. Paintings are compressed packages of thoughts and questions, offering a series of choices, source inspirations, and relationships that were arrived at over a length of time, but presented to a viewer all-at-once. To hold this multiplicity or see two things at once is a slippery, uneasy, and ultimately stimulating feeling. This is how I build my paintings.
My work over the past 5 years has engaged in transfer and translation, exploring concepts like mishearing, substitution, and applying painting logic and ideas outside of the traditional materials of the discipline. I’ve begun using quilting techniques as an expansion of my painting practice, often returning to my older paintings as a point of departure to explore those ideas in new ways. Quilts are objects built for time travel, as they are commonly passed from generation to generation while maintaining relevancy as objects of visual pleasure and tactile comfort. In this context, I think of revisiting my painting ideas through quilts as recalling “past lives” by creating retrospective heirlooms.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Amanda Smith earned an MFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a BA from the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA. She has exhibited and lectured nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at SPRING/BREAK Art Show in NY, the Rochester Art Center in MN, the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center in Kansas City, Box 13 Art Space in Houston, the International Quilt Museum, and Biblioteca Viva Egana in Santiago, Chile. She has been a visiting artist at many universities including Temple University, Rome, Italy, the University of Kansas, and the University of South Carolina. Smith has been an artist-in-residence at Fljótstunga in Iceland, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Arrowmont Pentaculum, Art 342 in Fort Collins, Monson Arts in Maine, and Est-Nord-Est in Quebec, Canada. She is an Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting at Missouri State University.
© Amanda Smith