Artist: Karinne Smith
Exhibition title: Melon Skin
Venue: M 2 3, New York, US
Date: September 10 – October 23, 2021
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and M 2 3, New York
M 2 3 is pleased to present Melon Skin – an exhibition of new work by Karinne Smith. An opening reception will be held on Friday, 10 September 2021 from 4 to 8 pm (patio reception). Please note: Face coverings and compliance with social distancing protocols are required for entry. Capacity inside the exhibition space is limited per the discretion of the gallery. The exhibition will be on view 10 September through 23 September 2021.
Our private lives — our fantasies, rituals, and identities — are increasingly mortgaged to create our public personas. In Karinne Smith’s work, this give-and-take leaves a void which language cannot fill. Family histories and cherished memories are shown to be as malleable as fondant and as porous as the surface of a cantaloupe. Her works complicate a conventional understanding of genre, finding terror in the romantic and the grotesque in conventional beauty. Stripped of our ability to divorce pleasure from repulsion, the fecund from the putrid, we are led to the uneasy realization that horror is a genre through which we can remake the world.
Recent works have used found photos as points of departure: emotional documents which, in the hands of the artist, are both detached from their original meaning and open to new narratives and associations. The artist combines material experimentation with ideas of femininity, adolescence, and domesticity in an installation which ultimately pushes the viewer toward a visceral sensory experience, one wrought with overabundance. – Holly Bushman
Karinne Smith (American, b. 1992) holds a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley (2013), and an M.F.A. in Sculpture from Yale University, New Haven, CT (2020). Recent exhibitions include the inaugural exhibition Girl You Want at ArtYard, Frenchtown, NJ (2021); and The Red Wedding at RUSCHMAN, Chicago (2021). This is the artist’s first exhibition with M 2 3.
