Rebecca Smith is an artist whose constructions entail aspects of drawing, painting and sculpture without limiting themselves to the dictates of any one of these processes. Her work has physical presence, inviting the eye into literal depths of space, demanding adjustment of perspective from its agile viewers. She plays upon a tactile sense of visceral surface, twisting shape, and the tensions of one form pressing against another. But her work is also planar, establishing pictorial space and exploiting the relationship of constructed forms with the wall or floor that serve as their support. Color and its textured application are integral to the formal unity of her work, but never subservient to it.
Her line is radically abstract. Without becoming schematic or semiotic, it has the notational characteristic of drawing, despite its particularity of expression, its real presence, its sheer funkiness. And like drawing, her sculpture is essentially exploratory, a stand-in for something bigger, perhaps, and something awaiting further elaboration, whether from the artist or her viewer. DAVID COHEN
Rebecca Smith, Walking on the Ceiling, 2011.
Rebecca Smith: Interference through November 24 at Hionas Gallery, 124 Forsyth Street, between Delancey and Broome streets, New York City, 646-559-5906,