All of the women in Vicki Smith’s paintings are suspended, floating in water and time. They court peace in pools and lakes, postponing gravity, going nowhere fast. Sometimes you can glimpse some rocks or stretch of shore at the edge of a frame, but mostly they are alone, buoyant and unbothered. These scenes are rendered almost romantically, with impasto snarls of blue and green and ochre, and when Smith talks about them, she uses words like “serene,” and “meditation,” and “memory.” She doesn’t even think of her women as “swimmers,” she says. “To me, it’s more intangible than that, a limitlessness that’s closer to flying.”
Smith says she wants her audience to feel weightless, to experience that same kind of lightness you get in your chest while floating and watching the sky drift by. Her tableaus feel dreamlike insofar as they appear fuzzy from up close but cohere as recognizable, even familiar, scenes with a couple feet of distance and a couple seconds to find the visual logic. In this way, her paintings mimic what it feels like to recall a moment. She’s interested in memory when it arrives involuntarily, like Proust and his tea-soaked madeleine. Her latest suite of paintings includes titles like Well-Being, Flow Forward, and Good Medicine, this last shared with her May exhibition at Bau-Xi in Toronto, her fifth solo show with the gallery in as many years.
