Emily Mae Smith Explores Symbolism, Materiality In Petzel Show

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Artist Emily Mae Smith has clarified that her work aligns more closely with fin-de-siècle Symbolism and the Nabis movement than with Surrealism, an interpretation often linked to her post-pandemic rise in the ultra-contemporary art market. Smith's auction record currently stands at approximately $1.6 million, achieved when Broom Life sold for HK$12.35 million at Phillips Hong Kong in June 2021 against an estimate of HKD400,000–600,000.

Speaking to Observer ahead of her exhibition“Transit of Venus” at Petzel in New York, Smith discussed her focus on ambiguous, evocative allegorical language that uses poetic metaphors and symbols to address uncertainty. Her 2024 exhibition at the Magritte Museum in Brussels, which juxtaposed her art with works by Magritte, had reinforced the Surrealist connection.

An example of Smith's approach is Sacred Conversations ( 2026 ), which blends several historical genres. This hyperreal still life depicts animals, plants, and artists' tools within a shallow architectural niche, evoking the precision of a natural history display or a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities. Small pigment jars line a lower shelf beneath the carved word“EMSKITH,” suggesting a studio portrait composed of the organic materials, animal hairs, and plants used in painting. The improbable arrangement pushes the image into an allegorical realm, transforming it into a celebration of painting's material world as a devotional, symbolic ecosystem.

Smith explained that Sacred Conversations originated as a vanitas portrait of her own studio. Observing her brushes led her to consider their material origins, she said,“I was pulling out my paintbrushes and looking at them: this one is sable, this one is badger, this one is squirrel. Beyond being a tool, the tool is made from something in the world.” This perspective led her to populate the canvas with the creatures and substances used to create art.

This awareness of materials and processes has become more critical for Smith in the current sociopolitical and technological climate. She believes that as images proliferate and oversaturate imagination and communication, people are losing sight of the effort required to create objects and images.“Images are not the same thing as paintings,” Smith reflected. She suggested that painting allows for a more conscious, deliberate, and analytical construction of symbolic presences that can gradually develop into narrative or meaning. Her practice involves a continuous engagement with historical canons and tropes, using archetypal symbolism to reveal semiotic and psychological dynamics.

Smith shares with Magritte an exploration of the semiotic instability between image and object, employing visual trickery to contemplate the impossibility of a final, fixed truth. Her works prompt a decoding process that disassembles and rearranges elements, exposing how symbols accumulate specific meanings over time while revealing the arbitrariness of their function. At the core of her approach is an inquiry into who and what controls an image's meaning. She embraces the instability that emerges between phenomenological encounters, cognitive decoding, and individual signification.

This focus may explain the prevalence of hybrid, trickster-like figures in her New York paintings, perpetually on the verge of metamorphosis. These figures highlight the instability of any interpretation of reality, which depends on the interaction between seeing and naming objects, and how psychological and physical perception intertwine with cultural constructs. Anthropomorphic traits in her signature broomstick, grapes, plants, and other organic forms illustrate how humans project an anthropocentric perspective onto their surroundings. Smith suggests this is not the only way to relate to coexisting entities in a complex web of interdependencies.

The exhibition features a renewed vision of nature. Smith, who grew up in rural Southwest Texas but lived in New York for 22 years, recently moved back to the countryside. She acknowledged this shift in environment, stating,“Three years ago, I moved upstate. My house is in the country, so I am back in the forest now. It is a very different nature from my childhood, but it is definitely affecting me.”

Several works in the show draw from bucolic life, hinting at the changing seasons while operating on an allegorical register, akin to fairy tales where animals represent human behaviors and relationships. Smith, an avid reader since childhood, noted that fairy tales and literature have long shaped her imagination. She feels her current environment reinforces the magical quality of her work, citing“fairy-tale encounters” such as a fox that roams near her house in winter.“Crazy things happened to me after I moved. I realized I could smell better. My sense of smell improved dramatically. Most often, sort of magical things are happening in real time, in real space... Nature happens,” she added.

An autumnal atmosphere permeates the exhibition, capturing the transition from warm days to winter, as seen in Becoming Neolithic ( 2026 ). In Only Human ( 2026 ), red grapes among green vine leaves evoke the same season, but Smith has transformed each into a glossy eyeball with visible irises and veins, adding a psychological and symbolic layer. The painting began with the idea of a transparent form containing sloshing liquid, prompting her to consider what might agitate or inhabit that space.“The eye can stand in for the person. At the same time, the grape can carry so many different symbols, depending on the painting, but I love how it is an object that can be an individual and a collective at the same time,” she explained.

Smith also sees the grape as a metaphor for paint itself, which consists of“individual molecules wrapped in oil that get moved around to create an image and an entire symbolic world.” The crepuscular light in many works suggests a liminal moment before darkness, hinting at an underlying sinister quality, perhaps a sense of impending disaster or a cycle ending, which might lead to renewal after decay and destruction. Smith commented,“I think it is also just a feeling I am having. It kind of feels like our civilization is in that season, and also, as a planet, I think we are maybe before a real crisis.” Her iconic broom motifs also appear in these new works, often depicted in moments of transition, a symbol that entered her lexicon around 2014, partly inspired by Disney's Fantasia.

Source: Observer Arts

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