Emily Mae Smith with Amanda Gluibizzi for The Brooklyn Rail

Emily Mae Smith at Brand X Editions, 2022

From The Brooklyn Rail:

The possibilities of painting are on full display at Emily Mae Smith’s current exhibition, Heretic Lace, installed at Petzel’s new Chelsea space. This concise show of eleven paintings demonstrates Smith’s command of her medium in strategies such as bravura brushwork, naturalism verging on trompe-l’œil, seamlessly liquid gradients, and backlit contre-jour effects. These moments are painting for painting’s sake, but they also permit the artist—along with her broom- or brush-like avatars, alter-egos, and fellow travelers—to initiate a discourse with/in Painting. The challenges Smith sets for painting, and that art returns, are not always fully satisfied, something she has confronted by portraying a paintbrush-wielding broom in the guise and posture of Ingres’s Oedipus explaining the riddle of the Sphinx (The Riddle [2017]). In a wide-ranging conversation held in October 2022, Smith and I discussed labor and class and their avoidance by the art world, the importance of getting the angle of a fishhook just right, and the impact that can be felt when we open art up to a painterly new broom.