Mark R. Smith | Stress Formations

March 2 - April 29, 2023

Opening Reception: March 2, 2023, 5:30 - 7:30 pm

Mark R. Smith’s Stress Formations features new textile paintings and laser engravings that expand on the artist’s interest in social networks and structures, and the physical organization of crowds.

In Stress Formations, Smith considers the collective weight the events of the past few years have had on all of us and what he sees as a fascinating contrast between what people were doing privately at home to cope with stress—by picking up handicrafts like lacemaking, crocheting and knitting—versus the mass events that were unfolding in public, such as the civic unrest following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and adjacently, the January 6th Capitol riot. Smith’s works on view plumb the tension between social cohesion and division through a careful interplay of materials and forms.

The exhibition features a large fabric painting evoking the shape of a tent or a beehive, with each striped, glowing orange or yellow fabric square growing progressively larger from top to bottom. In this work Smith questions who is included in the safe, collective shelter of the big tent. Nearby, smaller works combine laser engraved crocheted doilies with cutout figures from newspapers like the New York Times, arranged to echo the form of the lacework: Smith’s attempt at organizing the unruly.

In a final, large-scale work Smith revisits his interest in Elias Canetti’s pivotal 1960 book, Crowds and Power, a poetic treatise on crowd dynamics centered on the notion of touch as a driving mechanism. Here, in fabric collaged with laser cut figures in simple formations, Smith creates different patterns based on the eleven crowd symbols identified by Canetti: sea, rain, fire, rivers, forest, corn, wind, the heap, stone heaps, sand, and treasure. Though Smith’s new works reflect on the social and political upheaval of the last few years, his engagement with Canetti offers hope that the solution to our collective angst lies in togetherness.

Mark R. Smith's work explores pattern and recycled textiles, creating unconventional objects based on a conceptual framework. Smith manifests his ideas through a labor-intensive process, transforming everyday materials into dynamic, thoughtful paintings. Smith received his BFA from The Cooper Union (New York, NY) and his MFA from Portland State University (Portland, OR). He has had solo exhibitions at the Office of the Governor (Salem, OR), Northview Gallery at Portland Community College (Portland, OR), Gallery Hlemmur (Reykjavik, Iceland) and The Art Gym at Marylhurst University (Marylhurst, OR). Smith was included in The Oregon Biennial three times and received the curator's award in 1995 and 2001. He has also received many public commissions, including projects with Trimet, Providence Hospital and the Port of Portland (all Portland, OR). Smith's work is included in a number of public and private collections, including the American Embassy (Accra, Ghana), CityArts Inc. (New York, NY), King County Public Art Collection (Seattle, WA), Lewis and Clark College (Portland, OR) and Nike Inc. (Beaverton, OR).