Heather Kai Smith

Heather Kai Smith renders images of crowds, but it's the way she renders these social behaviors that captures human activity in all its strangeness, and points its painterly finger beyond what we think we know about social behavior.

These social ornaments are framed in a way that critically selects only the essential activity, and  renders it in washed-out monochromatic hues — often primary colors or black and white — that suspend the subject matter in a dreamy substance. This painterly suspension abstracts the subject matter, as if to imply that it is observed from the perspective of an outsider zooming in on sets of rituals that are enigmatic to whatever that alienated perspective might be. In one hazy yellow image evoking languid summer days, a group of people share a space with enigmatic geometric ornaments. It's reminiscent of Durer's Melancholia, where the central character, an enlightened measurer of all things, finds little joy in his modern environment of scientific apparatuses. Smith's picture is different though, as multiple characters are engulfed in a similar garden of abstraction, but their relationship to such instruments is more taken for granted as a natural part of the modern landscape. They are playground toys that these characters might not expect anything from except for a fleeting moment of distracted novelty. Distinct from Durer's Melancholia, there is no expectation for a transcendence of discovery, so there is nothing to be melancholically disappointed by. The characters might as well be part of the landscape, instruments or half-objects themselves, evacuated of ideals. Instruments to each other.

We don't know from what perspective the social ornaments are perceived, but the viewer can see from this alienated, mysterious perspective just as they may be looking for their own face in these terrifying but potentially profound crowd formations. However, the faces that viewers will find in these surveilled dreamscapes will not be their own, but rather a motley and precarious organization of nightmarish, savage faces that parry the alienated aspect of the outsider's critical eye. In () a geometric scaffolding of sinewy blue limbs vaguely leads to disembodied faces whose crude sketchiness captures the terrifying yet exhilarating feeling of crowd consciousness, where its characters are objectivized, but only as an element of something larger than the sum of its parts. As social ornaments are often in transient movements, the paradoxical freezing — or 'pregnant moment' — that Smith captures reveals the vague individual that these social formations otherwise erase. Indeed, the drawn faces have either an erased, or never-fully-rendered quality. They can appear like masked Greek choruses, but evacuated of the chorus' interpretation or insight into what the given activity means. The faces of individuality are not quite fleshed out, they only have basic indications, the bare minimum of what is required to be a face at all, as if they're caught mid-metamorphosis, from something eerily prehuman to human, or, maybe more barbarically, human individuals fading back into prehuman nature. Like all good artists, Smith is agnostic about the prognosis. A lesser artist would tend towards pedanticism (although the geometric arrows et al. 'point' in that direction). The drawerly crudeness simultaneously conveys a moment of possibility — perhaps that individuals may find greater individual expression amidst a crowd that could emphasize instead of eradicate their differences — as well as the moment of that possibility's eclipse. This individuality may emerge merely as a fleeting apparition, only to then be swallowed up by that crowd and returned to a primordial Oneness. In this framing, the sketchy faces haunt and tease the viewer with the possibility of individuality, or bad infinity. There is great tension here, and it is the viewer's introspective eye that is unbounded in constructing any determination of the completion of what these individual non-finitos evoke. 

Some of Smith's drawings even have the quality of an 'all-over' painting, leaning into something akin to a 'magic eye' image, suggesting that the crowds serve a purpose beyond their own formation: only in squinting or crossing one's eyes, taking quick, furtive glances, or seeing through the crowds can a much more essential image emerge. As if crowds are mere projection screens for introspected, surreal vistas. As rituals have always been about something else beyond their own collectivity, the beyond in Smith's pictures is as ambiguous as it is necessary. The implication is that a crowd is a means, rather than an end in itself. Yet, there is always the possibility that these crowds have become ends in themselves, eternally continuous and ahistorical, eliciting a nightmarish shudder. If society is generally presumed to be constituted by individuals, but the individual is but a spectral non-finito, is it really even society or even socializing that is occurring in these pictures, or is it something much more terrifying and even anti-social?

Keeping pace with the inability to completely render individual features, when individuals do emerge from the crowd in Smith’s paintings, we only see their backside, as if they fear exposure. Indeed, they fear it because it is imminent. As the mere presence of a trace of an individual face jeopardizes the integrity of the collective structures, it's an understandable fear: exposure is certain death. In () another scaffolding of human ornaments provide a foundation for a singular man who, like the evanescent edge of a flickering flame, ephemerally rises above the crowd, transcended into the pristine white negative space of so many herds, blindly facing inward on the painting, turned towards his own abyss, but consigned to the corner of the picture plane. Indeed, the paintings with composites of crowds occasionally suggest these gaseous and transient fire forms. But only upon the deeper inspection that Smith's pictures foster does the viewer realize that this singular creature is suspended above a corporeal mesh of arms that will — or will not — receive him in a 'trust fall'. Is this 'community' supportive, or is it, like many communities over our species' violent history, the kind that sacrifices individuals for some kind of mystical eroticism? As viewers, we'll never know, even as in empathetic mimicry to the man about to fall backwards, we may lean back ourselves just by looking at the painting, feeling that moment of blissful abandon to the unknown. Such an ambiguous individual on the threshold of social injury — or redemption — symbolizes the plight of the individual writ large in our times: will he be supported by this aestheticized social ornamentation, and in the process gain a transformative understanding and confidence in what is vaguely referred to as the Self… or are these social ornaments merely decorations incapable of supporting the colorful richness of inner life that the vague individual occasionally glimpses? In many ways, the individual's tension with the collective continues to interrogate the core of modern human experience: a painful longing for a Dionysian Oneness or unity with nature that is necessarily expressed via the suffering of isolated individuals in private aesthetic experiences.

- Bret Schneider