Vicki Smith | Ripple Effect
Vicki Smith | Ripple Effect
November 18-30, 2023
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday November 18, 2-4pm
Bau-Xi Vancouver presents Ripple Effect, the highly anticipated solo exhibition from Toronto based artist Vicki Smith. Vicki Smith is a painter whose goal is peace. These evocative new images, replete with the calm energy of Smith's own meditation practice, feature the artist's incredible skill with the brush in capturing the look and movement of water. They draw in the viewer, prompting memories of times when swimming and floating enabled moments of solace amidst the cacophony of life.
Artist Statement:
Appearing from The Walrus magazine and Connor Garrel, upon express request of the artist as her favoured artist and show statement:
"All of the women in Vicki Smith's paintings are suspended, floating in water and time. They court peace in pools and lakes. postponing gravity, going nowhere fast. Sometimes you can glimpse some rocks or stretch of shore at the edge of a frame, but mostly they are alone, buoyant and unbothered. These scenes are rendered almost romantically, with impasto snarls of blue and green and ochre, and when Smith talks about them, she uses words like "serene", and "meditation", and "memory". She doesn't even think of her women as "swimmers", she says. "To me, it's more intangible than that, a limitlessness that's closer to flying."
-Connor Garrel on Vicki Smith, July/August 2023