Duane Reed Gallery- Sun Smith Floret

EXHIBITING GALLERY: Duane Reed Gallery

TITLE OF SHOW: Silver Screen Quilts: Art about Movies

OPENING DATE AND CLOSING DATE: September 11th, 2009 - October 14th, 2009

SHORT BYLINE/ DESCRIPTION OF SHOW: Silver Screen Quilts are works of cloth, paint and mixed media referencing film and cinema.

Duane Reed Gallery
4729 McPherson 
St.  Louis, Missouri 63108
314.361.4100
http://www.rduanereedgallery.com

My art life started with knitting, dressing paper dolls, scarf dancing with my younger sister and playing outside in a mud hole with sister and brothers  when I was  about seven and lived in a suburb of New York City. My mother took me to pick out wallpaper at least twice a year. My grandfather was a professional millinary designer who painted in oils and cooked as his hobbies. He loved children, was the most joyful member of my family and had great influence on many aspects of my life. He would deeply appreciate the aesthetics of how I work and live now. My home overlooks the Mississippi River in Elsah, Illinois where I am currently collaborating with an artist friend, Eric Gray, on rock wall  sculptures for a large and just manageable flower and vegetable garden that is my main hobby. That and cooking for family and friends. I share a studio upstairs over the Sidney Street Cafe in Benton Park with Barbara Simon, an artist friend of thirty five+ years.

My professional life is made up of both art making and a private practice as a Psychotherapist. The two intertwine and reinforce each other. All of my current art is about movies and the people who create them. Movies are about behavior and how we interpret the world,  ourselves and others, cultures, politics, love, death, money, history, the future, etc.

The desire to enhance my home with self created objects inspired me to study art and design. Independent work for several years with Leslie Lasky led to a BFA in Art History and an MFA from Washington University.

All of my waking hours have to do with what ever finally ends up on a given piece. Relationships with other people and one's own thoughts can be visually depicted, every nuance of the changing hues of river and sky expand the pallet. Every object, be it sky scraper or chicken's egg, has  balance between form and function. Anything well made is inspiration. Working with textiles has much to do with time, hand stitches being tiny markers. Great films are constructed from a vast complexity of ideas and concrete actions. The subjectivity of film and its collaborative nature challenge me to feel aspects of the film in a new way that is yet recognizable to other viewers.

Is the body an object?  I think so. Aging as mine is, I cherish it and live to honor it and the mind and heart it contains. I respect it's exquisite complexity and vulnerability, it's mortality, it's containment of the myriad emotions that define us as humans. My body is very much an agent of my art making process and I am often literally covered up or surrounded by a work in process.

Sun Smith Floret

http://www.rduanereedgallery.com/Artists%20Pages/smithforet/SmithForet.html