Michael Patrick O'Brien

Press Release

Inman Gallery is pleased to present Cary Smith: Like Ripples on a Blank Shore. The exhibition opens Friday, March 13, with a reception from 6 to 8 pm, and continues through April 25.

Cary Smith (b. 1955, Puerto Rico) makes hard-edge, abstract paintings that find their individual character from highly intuitive color interactions, a personal vocabulary of recurring motifs, and hand-painted precision. The artist has said his practice exists within the duality of logic and intuition, and cites Mondrian, Diebenkorn, antique American board games, Shaker baskets, Brancusi and Myron Stout among his influences. Of Mondrian in particular he has said, “Mondrian has poise, and there’s something elegant about the paintings, but they also have logic. Mondrian only uses black, white, blue, red, and yellow—logical—but the structures of his compositions are always intuitive.” Smith works with the inverse strategy: logical compositions and intuitive color. In Smith’s art, the two poles of logic and intuition are descriptive of the human condition, and he aims for the viewer to see the logic but to sense the human and the hand behind the making of the works. Smith states that, like the paintings, we all exist between states of freedom and self-consciousness.

In his debut Inman Gallery exhibition, Like Ripples on a Blank Shore, Smith makes a leap forward as a compositional strategy he terms ‘infiltration’ comes into focus. Existing motifs are complicated as new elements mingle and disrupt the paintings’ uniformity. A painting that was previously a grid of 16 colors on a blue ground is infiltrated by a yellow circle ringed in blue; another is infiltrated by a small ‘splat’—a motif that itself has been the subject of standalone canvases; and perhaps most radically, in another painting, a full quadrant of the composition is replaced with an entirely different motif.

Cary Smith (born 1955, Puerto Rico) earned a BFA from Syracuse University Art School, Syracuse, NY (1977). He has exhibited internationally for the past three decades, including solo exhibitions at Fredericks & Freiser, New York (2017, 2015); Aldrich Contemporary art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2014); Feature Inc., New York (2011, 2007); Derek Eller Gallery, New York (2000, 1999, 1997); and Koury Wingate, New York (1990, 1988). He has also been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Energy in All Directions, Tang Teaching Museum, Syracuse (Forthcoming July 2020); The Smiths, Marlborough Gallery, London (2019); nonObjectives, Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE (2017); and he was included in the 1989 Whitney Biennial, New York. His work is included in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum; New York; Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; UCLA Hammer Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT. Smith lives and works in in Farmington, CT.

Press Release

Inman Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition of portrait and figurative photographs entitled Where We Meet. Opening with a public reception on Thursday, March 1, from 6–8pm, the exhibition will continue through Saturday, March 31, 2018.

Photographs can be both documents of and catalysts for encounter. How we engage with the photographic image activates it and imbues it with desire, emotion, and longing; in many ways, the gaze becomes a kind of touch, connecting viewer, photographer, and photographic subject in a unique point of intersection and empathy. That point, the place where we meet, might offer a window, variously, into the works of Gay Block, Buck Ellison, Catherine Opie, Carrie Schneider, Hannah Starkey, Mickalene Thomas, and Jeff Whetstone. Indeed, taking that photographic point of encounter as its premise, the exhibition Where We Meet reflects on figures in intimate spaces and introspective moments, inviting the viewer in.

In a series of 100 photographs of women at home, reading books by female authors, New York-based photographer Carrie Schneider's Reading Women (2012-2014) are bathed in light, the spaces they comfortably inhabit defined by quietness. Here, connections abound: between reader and writer, between photographer and subject, between viewer and writer. Schneider maps an intellectual community of women, and provides each a space of her own. 

Mickalene Thomas's Portrait of Qusuquzah is from a series of photographs that include what she describes as lovers, muses, and family members: all people from her life. Placing her subjects in rich studio settings, Thomas's portraits invoke odalisque paintings, black-is-beautiful fashion photography of the 1970s, and long traditions of evocative studio photography, in a luxurious mix that heightens the inherent beauty of each subject. Buck Ellison produces staged photographs of hired models in mundane, bourgeois scenes that explore his ambivalent feelings about upper class, white privilege. His 2016 photograph Pro shows a young woman, hard at work on protest posters on the floor of her bedroom; here, he shows the "interior side of a public action," looking into the suburban context of protest movements and the history of upper class women’s involvement in activism in the United States. Catherine Opie's photograph, Flipper, Tanya, Chloe, & Harriet, San Francisco, California is from the series Domestic, iconic photographs of lesbian couples and queer families across the United States. Opie’s series makes visible the interior spaces of private lives, whose very existence challenges the political structures of the mid-1990s USA.

In Hannah Starkey and Gay Block's work, memory and the past become central organizing factors. Starkey's Street Pictures, evocative photographs of women in urban settings, restage moments from the artist’s visual memory. Block'sRescuers (1986-1988) are portraits of over 100 Christians who helped Jews escape the Nazis during the Holocaust. In both cases, the images require contemplation of the past, either on the personal or national scale. Similarly, Jeff Whetstone's Batture Ritual, a video of the Mississippi River, conflates micro and macro histories to look at the ecology of the river and its ever-changing intimacies. As fisherman gather on the banks, large and small boats, even cruise ships, glide down the river. 

In each of these works, scale is important: from large to small, outside to inside, personal to national, the artists in Where We Meet suggest that small gestures, intimate spaces, and personal moments bring much to bear on our understanding of shared experience. The artists use the photograph itself to draw the viewer into a shared space, creating a compelling site of connection that amounts to an invitation: the image is the site where we meet.

Inman Gallery is pleased to present these artists’ work in dialogue, and we would like to thank Tanya Bonakdar, Monique Meloche, Regen Projects, Yancey Richardson Gallery, Julie Saul Gallery, and the artists for the generous loans of the works for the exhibition.