Jaune Quick-To-See Smith

Tuesday, Sept. 16 - Friday, Oct. 17, 2008

Reception: Wednesday, Sept. 17, 5-7pm

The A.D. Gallery at UNC Pembroke is very pleased to exhibit the important painting and graphic work of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.  Smith is one of the best-known and most highly respected contemporary Native artists in today's art world.  Her work takes on and explores many of the most pressing issues facing humanity, but always with considerable irony and a wickedly funny sense of humor.

Smith is an enrolled Flathead Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Nation, Montana, currently living and working in Corrales, New Mexico.  She holds an Associate of Arts Degree from Olympic College in Bremerton, a BA in Art Education from Framingham State College in Massachusetts and an MFA from the University of New Mexico.

Smith calls herself a cultural art worker. Elaborating on her Native American worldview, Smith's work addresses today's tribal politics, human rights, and environmental issues with a keen sense of humor. 

Her approach to content is largely Post-modern, combining subtle choices of imagery with strident color.  The combination invites the viewer to venture deeper and deeper into the many layers of content imbedded in each work.  Deconstruction is an essential element in her art, for both artist and viewer.  She appropriates bits and pieces of fine art as well as popular culture, dropping them into the mix of her own imagery, to punctuate the overall message.  References to Picasso in War Horse in Babylon (pictured at left), and Snow White in King of the Mountain, two of the large paintings in the exhibition, offer examples of this methodology.  The power of her choices in this process is such that the appropriated bits function as visually powerful additions to the work, whether or not the viewer recognizes the quote or other aspects of its irony.  That's quintessential Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

Using this technique and many others, Smith manages to marry macrocosmic national and global issues with the microcosm of concerns and experiences in Native communities, exploring profound relationships between the two with both humor and irony.

For those familiar with Smith's work, the most recent examples in the exhibit may present a bit of shock.  The aggressive power of the imagery will be unfamiliar, compared to the quiet subtlety and even the raucous humor in some of her earlier work.  But the issues, the irony, the humor and the expert manipulation of media are all still there -- even her ubiquitous rabbit and coyote monikers.  But there is a greater urgency in these new works.  In this body of work she has clearly turned up the volume in the content that everyone familiar with her work so admires.

Related event:

Artist Talk by Greg Lindquist
September 18th, 11:00am
103 Locklear Hall