Artist: Willie Wayne Smith
Exhibition title: Loose Lips and Forgotten Lines
Venue: Good Weather, North Little Rock, US
Date: September 11 – October 17, 2015
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Good Weather, North Little Rock
Knowing one thing is a way of not knowing something else.
Robert Scholes (1975)
This radical dislocation between the world of romance and the world of experience has been exploited in different ways. One way, the most obvious, has been to suspend the laws of nature in order to give more power to the laws of narrative, which are themselves projections of the human psyche in the form of enacted wishes and fears. These pure enactments are at the root of all narrative structures, are themselves the defining characteristics of all narrative forms, whether found in “realistic” or “fantastic” matrices.
Robert Scholes (1975)
Loose Lips and Forgotten Lines is a pursuit of narrative forms through paintings and wall scrawls relying upon the automatic drawings and stream-of-consciousness language culled from Willie Wayne Smith’s headspace. A cathartic, exhausting, and slightly embarrassing act of scribbling poetic whiplashes of words is complicated by fantastical veils of imaginative coloring-book line drawings. Sometimes androgynous and wearisome figures inhabit ahistorical, and conceptually messy, tellings; an expressive process that has a tentative semblance to reality, a sort of subconscious reaction to the world. In the resulting narrative, each aspect of the invention has room for intervention, and so each aspect is a learning process reinforced by a fiction steeped in cognition, and as Scholes says, “helps us to know ourselves and our existential situation.”
Willie Wayne Smith, Pig Day, 2015
Willie Wayne Smith, High Ground, 2015
Willie Wayne Smith, Magic Hour, 2015
Willie Wayne Smith, The Fielders, 2015
Willie Wayne Smith, Resort Acumen, 2015