Siana Smith
(MFA 2021)
Mitigation
Mitigation is one of my commodity series artworks. My painting process is redolent to understanding myself. By rendering what I see in the mirror and through windows, I record traces and fragments of my journey within, what was and what is.
I am seduced by beautiful consumer products whose properties attract the eye and invite the mind to contemplate objects of desire through aesthetic values of balance, harmony, symmetry, and grace, that raise the consciousness and elevate the soul to recognize something which holds the capacity to move us wordlessly. However, I reject the banal innocence of pretty items by infusing beauty with foreboding threats in a social and psychological context.
The social aspects of commodity culture have always been an undeniable factor impacting consumers. Now more than ever, with the omnipresence of social media, online shopping and the relative democratization of luxury, products are valued beyond their usability and exchangeability, and they become symbols of success, status, identity and power. The “I see it, I like it, I want it, I get it” consumer mentality leads to excessiveness, urgency and immediacy. They are the pseudo-panacea and the mask to hide behind, but when ecstasy of the moment and false security wear off, emptiness, rejection, and abandonment remain, fostering an insatiable desire that is never quenched.
Pink Backpack
Pink Backpack is painted in response to the uncertainty and heaviness I have been encountering in 2020 regarding social, environmental, political, and personal situations. The journey of finding answers to questions of who am I and how I feel started in my paintings of portraitures and commodities in the past several years. Not satisfied with what was seen from outside in plain view, I want to shift the focus to the inner world and space underneath the surface. A young woman standing firm in the bleak darkness with her head held up high, and the light from above washing over her, including the world she is standing on. The darkness separates the light and earth while she is in between worlds. I am with her in that space of ambiguity, ambivalence, and vulnerability, seeking clarity and security in life and the spirit to fight for freedom from oppression and not be contained by it.
The pink backpack, which is not in the painting except for the straps, takes on a symbolic meaning of what we owned in the past and have at present, including psychological richness and burdens with an added feminine essence. It’s a spiritual metaphor for hope and mental strength rather than material objects. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried, just like the pink backpack.
The painting is about a relationship with the idea of benevolent force for good, which can help me navigate the difficulty of everyday darkness, a sense of my single light source and complex reality. I emphasize the verticality by creating the space above and the area below the figure, which is a temporal vessel for the eternal. The nature of life is unpredictability with immense beauty and great sadness at times, generally a moving pattern of possibilities. But faith is a way for me to distinguish between the good and the evil, uncertainty and fear. In a sense, this painting is to celebrate and question at the same time, both philosophical and spiritual, intellectual and intuitive.
Bound To Be
Bound To Be is another one of my commodity series artworks.
Merchandise is the thread woven into the fabric of not only social, economic, and class distinctions, but also sexism and psycho-socialism. My work questions conventional beauty in the context of femininity, sexuality and the male gaze, provoking conversations around topics of the femme fatale, feminist identity, and male supremacy. Torn between the allure of beauty and its inherent danger, I address this dilemma as a condition that always accompanies me.