KIKI SMITH

Shield No. 5

September 17th - October 30th 2022

Swivel Saugerties is proud to present Kiki Smith’s Shield No. 5 (2021), on view in the Safe Room from September 17th through October 30th, 2022. Since the gallery’s opening, The Safe Room Project has held shows accompanying the main exhibition.  The decision to feature Kiki Smith alongside Angela Conant’s solo exhibition, NO FATE, came organically given the two artists’ close artistic affinity. The Safe Room’s industrial feel contrasts with Smith’s work, which crosses mediums and disciplines to explore embodiment and the natural world. 

Emerging as second wave feminism was waning, Kiki Smith’s representational art was distinct during a time period when abstraction was the prevalent trend. For Smith, whose father was a lauded abstract sculptor, abstraction was “like air, completely natural,” and therefore figuration held a diametric allure. 

Following the death of her father in 1980, Smith shifted her work’s focus to human corporeality and mortality. She began training as an emergency medical technician, earning her certification in 1985. Her experience as an EMT had an immediate impact on her – "It is physically very beautiful to look at the exposure of the insides and outsides at the same time.” Her interest in physiology culminated in a multitude of sculptures, drawings and prints that combine sensitive mark-making and intuitive rendering with a clinical observation of life-sized human organs.

Smith removed these elements from their somatic context and translated them through unexpected, delicate materials. Her large crystal glass sperms are objects of beauty; her somber paper figures hang delicately from ceilings. Through representations of the female body, she subverts traditional feminine archetypes of religion, mythology, and folklore. Her poetic approach to the corporeal is at once emotive and powerful.

The first iteration of the work on view, Shield (1988), is a series of plaster works that were cast from four third-trimester pregnant bodies. With the work’s title, Smith observes parallels between the form and function of the pregnant body with protective armor, challenging archaic assumptions about maternal gender and vulnerability. Shield No. 5 (2021) originated when Conant was in her 38th week of pregnancy, and offered to cast her own protruding belly for Smith to make an additional piece for the Shield series. Despite the 32 years between its creation and that of the last piece in the series, Shield No. 5 makes a contiguous link in the sequence of these works, finding solid social relevance in both artists’ temporal-social contexts.