Fragmented Landscapes
ROOMS Annex, 1521 S. Main
Through April 25
A light rain tapped the pavement as Caty Smith’s Fragmented Landscapes opened at the ROOMS Annex near 15th and Boston last week. The small gallery quickly filled with friends, family, and fans, the noise rising as the space grew crowded. I drifted toward the quiet walls where Smith’s memories seemed to cling and overlap—some bound together, others lifting slightly with each opening of the door.
A portrait of the artist opens the show, as if she’s looking right into her new body of photo-based mixed media work. Beneath her portrait lay a lighter version of her, stitched to the first with two lines of red thread whose loose ends move breezily through space. These double portraits—a newer version of a self linked to an older version—are themselves stitched to a landscape Smith snapped while in transit from London to Calais, France, the first of many trips featured in the exhibit.
Caty Smith is a Tulsa-based artist whose work resists easy categorization. She often works with known materials in a non-traditional manner, such as submerging Polaroid film into hot water to separate the gelatinous image then rehoming it onto new surfaces. Her practice moves fluidly between techniques, from sashiko stitching onto prints made from digitized negatives to collaging photographs onto three-dimensional forms. After leaving Tulsa for some time to travel to many of the places featured in this show, Smith returns with work that continues to fuse physical and digital processes, collapsing the boundary between image and object.
Created with a grant from the Artists Creative Fund, Fragmented Landscapes explores how place and memory intersect through experimental, process-driven works. Using photographic negatives from her travels, Smith experiments with 19th-century cyanotypes, painting a light-sensitive iron onto paper and exposing it to the sun. After a rinse in water (or tannic acid for the darker tones), the dreamy blue images are set in the paper and ready for the next experiment she has up her sleeve. Sweeping cyan strokes along the paper’s edge feel like a painting, softening the crisp edges typically associated with photographic prints. Paper drifts free of the walls, loosely attached at specific points, creating a movement that draws the viewer into a more immersive encounter. The works resist settling on a single narrative, instead layering materials and techniques that invite us to actualize a unique moment together with the artist. Her memory reel permeates into ours.
Before I had a chance to move around the room, a voice from the crowd asked us to gather for some welcoming remarks. We dutifully formed a hushed circle as Bowie Rowan, a fellow ACF artist, guided us into the show with the following words:
There is a field we all go to.
A field of image, sensation, emotion.
We call it memory.