Review

A review of Amanda Smith's Threshold

Amanda Smith, Grizzly Green, 45" x 60", oil and acrylic on canvas, 2007. Photo: Larry Gawel, courtesy of artist

Leedy-Voulkos Art Center
Kansas City, Missouri
September 5 – 30, 2008

by Steve Brisendine

Looking at the paintings in Amanda Smith’s Threshold is a bit like trying to get one’s bearings in a dream. There is a simultaneous sense of “I know this place” and “Okay, where in the world am I?”

Florridor, 71" x 50", oil and acrylic on canvas, 2008. Image courtesy of artist

In the nine works that made up her September exhibition at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, Smith drew not from her private dreamscape, but from a communal space where sound and images flash by in the dark — the movie theater.

“By abandoning chronological time and literal space, film mimics memory and internal thought,” Smith writes in her artist’s statement. “Remembrance asks that we suspend time to experience the past in the present. In many ways, to remember is to create a new world by evoking things that no longer exist, and never existed exactly as we recall.”

Smith’s work is not concerned with actors or directors. Instead, she takes places that have appeared in films and does the painting equivalent of a musical mash-up — creating a new work from the riffs and chords of others.

The effect is both familiar and strange — even more so because the imagery is shared across the movie-going culture, rather than private.

Topoasis, 45" x 60", oil and acrylic on canvas, 2007 Photo: Larry Gawel, courtesy of artist

Only one of the nine paintings — all of which focus on openings or transitions — mentions a specific location by name. That is the 2008 piece Versaillesmilitude, in which purple-green overgrowth encroaches upon the French palace. (The meeting of natural and manmade elements is another common theme of Threshold.)

Stairway, 24" x 32", oil and acrylic on canvas, 2008. Photo: Larry Gawel, courtesy of artist

“Name That Film” moments abound, drawing the viewer back for another look. Is the hallway from 2008’s Florridor from The Princess Bride? Are those half-hidden lips in Stairway, also painted this year, from The Rocky Horror Picture Show?

But even for the film-illiterate, the composition and imagery of Smith’s paintings make them worth seeing. After all, one doesn’t always have to “get” every element of a dream to enjoy it.

Verisaillesmilitude, 22" x 28", oil and acrylic on canvas, 2008. Photo: Larry Gawel, courtesy of artist

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