Be Right Back
Victoria Smits
January 9 - February 27
Receptions:
Opening Reception: January 9, 5–7 PM
Second First Friday: February 6, 5–7 PM
Artist Talk: February 5, 5:30 – 6:30 PM, Register here
Be Right Back: Call and Response Performance February 27, 5:00 – 7:00 PM, Register here
On View: Wednesday - Saturday, 11 AM-4 PM beginning January 9.
My engagement with varied media originates in my childhood in upstate New York where I had access to streams, forests, and fields. Nature was my first studio. This ebullient freedom created a foundation of percipience and agency; text and visual converge, science and cheesecloth hold hands, and the abstraction of the natural environment intersects with the maternal. I integrate the plausibility of strife and discord as moments of evolution and growth.
Be Right Back follows this integrative approach into a language of suspended rest. In the fourth essay of Ross Gay's Inciting Joy, he addresses our capitalist obsession with time, beginning with a memory of seeing a Post-It note in a coffee shop stating, "Be Right Back," a message often met with annoyance. We exist in a patriarchal, product-driven culture where time functions as an equation of our worth. As an anti-capitalist construct, as antithesis to the spectrum of suffering in the world, this exhibition offers to stop time and provide sanctuary to find our breath and feel ease.
Earlier in Inciting Joy, Gay describes deer emerging in an unexpected place as he reflects on the death of his father. The sighting is seen as a blessing, "That it'd be okay." I had a similar experience when I left my parents home just before my father died where two deer leapt across my path. It was a moment of embodied cognition — where the body and its interaction with the environment plays a central role in understanding.
These experiences materialize within a temporal structure of intimate drawings based on objects culled from forest walks in the manner of Jane Bennett’s “paying a lot of attention to everything (Bennett, Vibrant Matter: The Political Ecology of Things). A central video montage of chance encounters with deer, seen since my father’s death, projects on textile scrim made of thrifted, hand-stitched, reconstructed clothing. Donated infant laryngoscopes, accompanied by sensor-activated voice, join together to create a light fixture sculpture that references our first breaths and the need for breath to survive. We are pulled from concreteness, from "so-called time" to a sense of "life-ly" — to "rest inside that nothing (happening)" (Gay, Inciting Joy).-
About Victoria Smits:
Victoria Smits is an interdisciplinary artist and writer living in Eugene, Oregon. Her practice begins in attention: what she sees, what she notices, what energies affect her body. Smits explores the intersection of these conceptual discoveries with research-driven work including installation, textiles, sculpture, video, sound, drawing, and writing.
Smits’ work has been exhibited at the Manchester Craft and Design Centre, UK; Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, IL; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Old Stonehouse in Brooklyn, NY; and Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA, among others. Smits' poetry can be found in the edited collection, Gone Feral: Unruly Women and the Undoing of Normative Femininity through Demeter Press. She studied English, Art, and Secondary Education at Calvin University, received an MA in English Education with a concentration in creative writing from the University of Buffalo, and an MFA through the School of Art Institute of Chicago.
This exhibition is supported by The Ford Family Foundation.
