west follies
16 January - 21 May 2025
Solo exhibition of 38 at Caravan Gallery in Fort Worth, TX.
“Everything here survives with stubborn insistence. The sun bleaching, cracking, stripping things man-made of color. I often reflect on my own mortality. Something about this place, linear time lapses, mutating into a layered mass of memory that can be sliced through and experienced all at once. In Texas, the membrane between past and future is thin, and specters of both tenses flicker in the hot air, seeking acknowledgement in the present. It is not romantic, it is a proving ground.”
Based in the visual language of the domestic and suburban banality of the American West, Karinne Smith transforms the peripheral objects of everyday life–water jugs, plastic chairs, laundry–as an invitation to linger in the mysticism of the mundane.
Made over the course of her year-long residency in Fort Worth, west follies encompasses a range of paired works produced across various media, including photography, print, painting, and sculpture. Each work carries the impression of some other time or place, now absent; a haunting which is only echoed in their respective doubling–somehow both familiar to one another yet strange. This tension between congruity and splitting is what defines the works you see as Smith bends our vision to a world somehow both ignored and omnipresent, a mirage which can only arise in the arid urbanity of the West.
