Artist: Paul Anthony Smith

For his first solo public art exhibition, Paul Anthony Smith debuts a new body of work which explores themes of communion, spirituality, memory, and Caribbean cultural reverence. His process begins with capturing his subjects via film photography. Utilizing his distinctive picotage technique, where he employs a needle-like tool by hand, he picks away patterns that overlay the figures or the environment. The picotage functions as a tool to conceal visual information, upending traditional uses of photography which has, historically, used images to reveal information.

This exhibition features grayscale images of two Caribbean figures––St. Thomian fencer Daryl Homer, and Jamaican performance artist Zachary Fabri––in a lush, natural environment. Despite their seemingly dissonant practices, Paul Anthony Smith finds congruences in their life stories and physical movements. Smith will capture Homer and Fabri’s swift and expressive movements individually, using motion blur photography. Layering the images atop one another, using varying degrees of opacity to reveal elements from both images, Smith creates an illusion that the subjects were photographed simultaneously, seemingly in search of each other. The grayscale images, exhibited on spaces typically used for advertising, reject tropical fantasies of the Caribbean, while the figures’ balletic movements highlight themes of spirituality, communion, and ephemerality, which remain integral to the region’s culture.

Paul Anthony Smith is curated by Public Art Fund Assistant Curator Jenée-Daria Strand.