Spend a little time talking with artist Emmitt Smith and it quickly becomes apparent how wide-ranging in scope his art practice aims to be. Ten minutes into our studio visit, Smith had already excitedly gushed about the artifice at the core of everything from reality television to Google Maps and the touristy Hilton Head Island (his South Carolina hometown). Somehow, the conversation took a sudden turn to a decidedly less-contemporary topic: the work of Hudson River School painter Frederic Church. Smith quickly grabbed a catalogue and turned to a painting Church made of the Andes from memory, ten years after he had actually visited them. “None of this could really have existed there. The palm trees couldn’t exist at that altitude” Smith gleefully tells me. For Smith, the paintings of Church are yet another instance in which the world becomes simplified, manipulated, repackaged, and then presented back to us as the “real thing”. Smith’s own work doubles both as a catalogue of these altered realities and as an attempt to strike back at our culture’s rampant obsession with manufactured fantasy.

Smith’s recent paintings consider one of the most ubiquitous of scientific artifacts: the map. In Smith’s densely layered canvases, maps are revealed to be less an objective scientific representation than a space of projected fantasy. 1992 (2017) finds Smith repainting the globe from memory (perhaps taking a cue from Church). Smith’s own hand is deeply present in his canvas, and he verges far from any attempts at “correct” map-making. The continents, painted over hazy washes of neon pink and deep purple, form slippery blobs that only vaguely recall their real-life counterparts. If longitudinal and latitudinal lines promise to help situate the viewer in this shaky geography, their undulations ultimately lead further astray. Hidden beneath this disorienting display is barely perceptible thin yellow text, which reads “The Real World.” While Smith may be making a joke here, he is also sincerely asserting that his own distinctively hand-made geography is as “real” as any of the other systems of mapping we are typically accustomed to.

By coyly manipulating the formal aesthetic of the map, Smith’s paintings address the political tensions that lie at the heart of the traditional map’s claims to an objective gaze. In many of Smith’s paintings, the process is deliberately laid bare for the viewer to see: in too much world (2017), for instance, each line of the globe is painted so that the previous layer remains visible along the line’s edges. The painting thus resists the typical process of “flattening” that occurs in digital imagery by insisting on an image’s depth and history. The emphasis on lines also evokes geographical borders and delineations of space. If maps typically present these borders as naturalized entities, devoid of historical specificity, Smith’s paintings insist on the border as an arbitrary conception.

Other of Smith’s “maps” paintings address the role that technology and data play in shaping our perception of geography. In mapstraction (2017), an oblong globe sits squeezed into a rectangular frame, its surface covered with webs of yellow lines and circles. Smith explained to me that the painting refers to an app called Flight Radar, which promises to show you all of the flights currently en route at any given moment. If Smith’s canvas seems to offer the viewer an informational graphic, the overload of data ultimately only blocks the viewer from coming to any sort of comprehensible conclusion. As Smith explains, the mapping of yellow lines “collapses into an abstraction that in the end defeats the purpose of having any sort of graphic.” The painting, too, seems to humorously depict the consequences of a “globalized” society: the web of connected cities threatens to strangle the world, forcing it to lose its spherical shape.

While Smith’s map paintings convey the fictions inherent in what is presented to us, other works by him aim to uncover the dangers in what remains hidden. In the desert of the real (2017), two camouflaged cacti emit bright red wifi signals. Yet, the cacti fail to merge into their backgrounds, instead seeming to awkwardly jump out at the viewer. It recalls just how imperfect any attempts at combining natural beauty with technological utility are.

On view in Smith’s studio were works that continued to toy with the wifi motif, bringing it into conversation with the benchmarks of 20th century abstraction. On the wall were small, monochromatic renderings of the wifi signal, evoking the canvases of both Frank Stella and Ad Reinhardt. Wifi signals are at once ubiquitous and invisible, their availability subtly shaping how we move through the world. Smith’s paintings give them center stage, yet even here they seem to threaten to disappear into the ether. It’s a reminder of how often we remain at whim to forces which remain invisible to us. Smith’s practice presents us with a world that is consistently lying to us—often in ways that we never realize. By visualizing those manipulations, Smith is trying to give viewers the tools to see through the artifice that pervades our world of digital imagery.

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The paintings of Jonathan Lyndon Chase display an overwhelming elasticity to them. Bodies are readily stretched, twisted and contorted to fit into spaces that remain unnameable but still very much present. In an untitled work from 2014, the space and depth of the painting references a fecal pile in the way the paint is stacked and sits on the surface with a kind of clumsy audacity. Visceral grit, orchestrated by a network of collaged material, weaves its way into more traditional painting language. But even the collage is sometimes abrupt, with intruding shards of aluminum foil, stitched yarn and foam, constantly causing the paintings to throb and pulse in and out of resolution.  Elegance is replaced with subtlety of intrusion and the tenderness of seamless collision. His figures are painted with skins that seem vividly translucent, allowing us to gaze through the stratified layers of paint. Their luminescence seems both coy and purposeful, often serving as the only rational light source.

Chase manages to excise gender performances from his paintings almost entirely. Instead, we are left with the residue of toxic masculinity, repurposed and repositioned in a manner that allows us to probe and question their function and meaning. Chase tends to leave his paintings absent of nameable places, with the exception of a few paintings – such as Man in Tub (2015) in which a figure’s limbs and body are recombined like Tetris pieces to fit snug into a placid bathtub, for instance, or another in which two figures are reclined in intimate repose in what appears to be a bed. In this intentional defamiliarization of space, he begins to deflate the omnipresence of normative social structures that forcefully define how and where conventionally masculine and feminine bodies are supposed to function. In this way, he prevents us from hijacking the agency of these figures forcing us to read their bodies as texts.

The specter of racist and homophobic violence looms large when queer black and brown bodies deny conventional legibility and insist upon the opacity of their own historical narratives. When we don’t know what to do with young black boys and girls who don’t behave according to our violent prescriptions of manhood or femininity, we kill them. We kill them with prayer. We kill them with conversion therapy.  We kill them with oversimplification.  We relegate their complicated and contradictory humanity to the darkest corners of our imagination. We erase them. What I find most intriguing about this work is the way Chase leans into this obscurity instead of privileging clarity. This playful and at times spectacular irresolution plays a significant role in his work.  Bodies are refigured as complex ensembles, brilliantly synthesizing the facility of his line, his deft paint handling, and a color sensibility that references comics and ‘90s cartoons.  A collection of hieroglyphic hands, heads, dicks and asses with an elastic relationship to one another and to the spaces they occupy, these robust and curvaceous figures at times aggressively push the limits of the picture plane and at other times are jettisoned into the constellation of body parts strewn about the canvas, leaving us to sift through the pile to discern the dead from the living.

Trying to place the men and boys in Chase’s paintings becomes a struggle. In one painting he simultaneously captures the enormity of Superman’s “Fortress of Solitude” as well as the suffocating horror of the Well in Buffalo Bill’s basement in “The Silence of the Lambs.”  In another painting, Man with Heads (2015), we see a figure carrying a sack of severed heads.  Again, like many of the figures in Chase’s paintings, he seems to glow almost like a beacon at the center of the composition, illuminating the sheets of dark walls that confine the open space behind him.  A bit farther off in the distance we notice two cliffs on either side of the canvas, converging into a precipice.  With a firm and confrontational pose, torso twisted around and eyes focused back onto us, and with a full view of his bare behind, the figure entices viewers toward this conceptual edge of the painting, reminding us that our polite curiosity is not to be trusted.

We do not miss the clarity of representational narratives in these paintings. Instead Chase presents us with a curious proposition. What if we affirm the unconventional complexity in the bodies of black and brown queer folk? What happens to gender if we decenter masculinity and femininity and consider other modes of self–expression, displacing history to freely probe and repurpose the sources of our identity construction?  There is no rush to answer these questions here. He instead forces us to sit, wholly attentive and present with every painting. This is encouraging.

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