Kara Smith

Room 322: A visual investigation

This new collection of paintings and mixed-media work was created in Summer 2024, while artist-in-residence at the Red Lion Inn.
In some of the pieces, the composition was directly influenced by found artifacts and ephemera from the vast history of the Inn. In other cases, the work is influenced by my personal experience of walking the halls and working in the building soaking up the textures, colors, shapes and sounds of the space. These works explore the idea that a place holds more than just its physical form; it holds a deep energy that infuses a place, transcends time and highlights the interconnectedness of past and present within its walls.

A few years back, we had a series of family members and friends pass away, all within a short span of time. As it happens in these situations, unexpected heirlooms, old photographs, letters, and random keepsakes began to find their way into our home and into our lives. Some of these artifacts carried a different weight, arriving with a certain power and evoking such strong memories and emotions. The stories embedded, provided glimpses into our ancestral lives, new perspectives on who they were, and what was important to them 

This series of mixed-media collages digs into the interconnectedness of past, present, and future. The work is built directly from this ephemera and is partially an homage to their legacy, but also a sketch into the peculiar and unique ways we find community and connection.

When lost, wayfinding signage provides visual cues to guide one through their environment and enhance their understanding and experience of the space. I recently discovered a term that gives meaning and context to this period in my life: Matrescence. Matrescence refers to the physical, emotional, hormonal and social transition to becoming a mother.

This developmental stage is marked by contradictions. It is a time of emotional tension and bliss, where there seems to be an almost constant need to reconcile expectation to reality, or the way things truly play out. Throughout this period of adjustment, there is also an identity transition and a need for self-preservation, separate from the role of motherhood.

These latest paintings use composition, shape and the repetition of the dot to explore balance, restriction and freedom, monotony and adventure. The relationships that emerge between color reflect the multiple versions of myself, and how we need to show up in our personal lives, in our community and for ourselves.

A couple of years back, I was in an antique store and came across an old scrapbook crafted by a girl named Rachel Blair. It was held together by a big elastic band, as the binding glue had deteriorated and the pages were falling out. The lined pages were those of a manuscript book with rounded edges, and each page had carefully pasted newspaper clippings.  

Unsure of what to do with it, the scrapbook sat in my studio for a while. This secret archive filled with seemingly random, yet meaningful items of importance to her felt weighted with memory. With the little personal information I could find, I spent hours and hours trying to track her or her family down. I even located and drove to her childhood home in Springfield, MA. I hoped this search would provide a clue on how best to move forward with this project.

My search provided the inspiration to begin an intimate conversation with Rachel. A way to connect and channel ideas about childhood expectations, disappointments, hopes, current events, tragedies and little moments of delight. A way to pause the natural course of history for two women of different generations and ages who will likely never meet.

 I began working with her images and other images from my collection to create a new collaborative collage series. Each collage is mounted on a 12” x 9” piece of black paper and features a page from her scrapbook. I add hand-painted paper designs and clippings from vintage books, magazines and other ephemera to highlight some of her ideas. All the while striving to keep the integrity of what I felt to be the important elements initially capturing her attention while injecting ruminations and philosophies to create a shared personal history. 

Pines and Stones

“Our lives we have carefully constructed from watermelon sugar and then travelled to the length of our dreams. along roads lined with pines and stones.” -Richard Brautigan

An extension of the Silent Music series, this work began with an unexpected influx of gifted slate. The pile of slate, covered with dirt and cobwebs, sat in a corner of my studio, until I was eventually compelled to fill a bucket with soap and water and began to wash each piece of metamorphic rock. During this process I was captivated by the rough yet delicate materiality of the the slate slabs. As stones and metals are inherently grounding, I became curious about the way we intrinsically connect to it on a very basic, bodily level.

After selecting a player piano roll, I began stenciling the patterned codes of the music, transcribing elements of the song onto the slate. The process began to have an almost alchemic feel, thinking about the work in relation to spiritually charged objects. While researching the ways in which symbols are infused with social memory and the collective unconscious, I decided to investigate the way we experience this shared language. The application of gold leaf feels almost like a branding of the slate with its own lore and history.

Silent Music on a Sunday drive. 

A few years back, at the beginning of a month long residency at the Vermont Studio Center, I took a Sunday drive and wandered into a small antique store where I discovered a dusty box of player piano music rolls.  Since then I have been investigating these rolls of Silent Music using stenciling as a form of writing or means of visually transcribing the music.  As I methodically stencil, song by song, I explore ideas of archive and artifact, automatons, methods of movement, patterns and language systems. In the beginning, some become the impetus for more figurative, narrative paintings, while the later works embrace the minimalist rhythm of marks. There is a dissonance between the audio of the music heard and the patterns created, reduced to codes on a canvas. Since the musician’s hand was removed with the creation of the automatic musical device, my quest has been to re-introduce the artist’s hand back into the process. I have moved from acrylic on large, unstretched canvas to pyrography on wood panels and most recently to gold leaf on slate. 

This collection of paintings emerge from the intersection of two fascinations:

I am a collector: imagery from dreams, ephemeral materials, personal anecdotes, archetypal symbols and myths that evoke a flashback – or faint sense of familiarity.

I observe body language, fleeting moments and peculiar ways people connect to each other and co-exist, looking to honor the subconscious mind.

The results reference the ghostly, unfixed memories that make up our collective personal histories.  I honor the fact that memory is not fixed, and is instead, a process of reconstructing, distorting, omitting and then passing on through generations. I’m particularly interested in what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget.  

Narratives of the collective unconscious.

Investigations into moments overlooked. Drawing from dreams, memories, myths, personal histories, archetypal symbols, worlds-real or imagined. Ghostly. Familiar. 

In 2013, I did a month-long intensive painting residency on the Dingle Peninsula, which is the westernmost tip of Ireland, and of Europe, for that matter. It typically receives about 100 inches of rain per year, but in a strange twist, I happened to visit during a heat wave. After my first week of classic, cool, misty Irish weather, the clouds departed and we were left with sunny, hot July days. Instead of rain gear, we donned bathing suits and spent just as much time swimming as we did painting the craggy cliffs, beautiful old farms and rolling green hills.