Ornaminimalism  writing + art by LAUREL SMITH 
 

SAINT JOHN, Oct 21/CNW/ - RBC Investments and the Canadian Art Foundation announced Laurel Smith as the Eastern Canadian finalist of the 2004 RBC Investments Canadian Painting Competition. Laurel's original work entitled Sjalso, will compete against the Center and Western Canadian winners of the 2004 painting competition at the national finals in Toronto on November 17, 2004. The winner will receive a $10,000 cash prize and two honourable mentions will each receive a cash prize of $7,000. 

  "The annual RBC Investments Canadian Painting Competition provides an opportunity to celebrare Canada's up-and-coming artists," said Russ Cook, head, Private Banking (Canada), RBC Investments. "It will be a pleasure to have Laurel's work included in the RBC art collection alongside works of the Group of Seven, the Automatistes, Painters Eleven and the Regina Five. 

  Laurel Smith was inspired to paint her winning artwork, Sjalso, while watchin sunsets in Gotland, Sweden. She was intrigued by the translucent light set against an opaque horizon and cloud forms. Laurel builds up more than 20 glazes of paint to a thick luminous surface. This contrasts with hidden bright, often flourescent, paint that reflects colour up and onto the surrounding wall. The contrast of the two seemingly extends the boundaries of the painting. 

There is a more and a less to the work of Laurel Smith. The more is about extending Minimalism into the 21st century. The less (or LS) of Laurel Smith is about her new show, LS is More, at Peak Gallery, through February. 

  American painter Frank Stella famously characterized the Minimalist art movement with the phrase "What you see, is what you see". Minimalism is typically defined by its reductive style, reducing a work of art to the minimum number of colors, values, shapes, lines and textures. Beginning with Russian Constructivists at the turn of the 20th century, the Minimalis movement grew roots in the West in the 1069's. The stripped down, elemental, fundamental style creates immediate visual impact without any particular representational form. Smith's new body of work, extends the Minimalist concept into today's digital age of excell. As Smith herself says, "I believe that minimal painting today is more vibrant and relevant than ever before". 

  The LS is More series is based on pantone colors, each with a unique formulation suggested by reductive titles like "Kerf 1235C230C:812". The paintings are presented as large rectangular color-ships; linear bands of color that stretch beyond the border of the canvas by emitting an intense halo when installed. Each work seems to have an inner light source, seeming to float on the wall, even as the depth of color brings a weighty quality to the paintings. 

  The radiance and glow of Smith's painted surfaces comes from a process of layering over 20 glazes onto plexiglas. The subtle fades, blue and wear of each glaze on top of the other create the richness in simplistic form identified with Minimalism, and certainly a characteristic of Smith's work. 

The works making up her wittily titled exhibition LS is more, the first Toronto solo show by this Calgary-based artist, are like horizontal slabs of gelatin: Thick but evanescent lozenges of saturated colour, the kind of colour that seems to be in perpetual suspension within its matrix. 

  Smith says her slabs glow because of the up to 20 coats of acrylic paint applied to the sheet of Plexiglas that supports them. This buildup of pigment, thicker than anything you'd comfortable refer to as "coats" of pigment, results in the kind of sweet, slick surfaces you associate with the hand-rubbed, infinitely deep, glossy, tangerine-flake surfaces of custom cars. 

  Adding to this deep effulgence, is the fact that Smith bevels some of the edges of her paintings (the paintings all vear the generic title Kerf, which means "the cut or the width of a cut made with an axe saw or cutting tool"), usually the tops or one of the sides. She paints these bevelled edges in an alternate colour from the painting's surface, so that when the gallery lights are trained upond the pictures, you get an attractive flair of extra colour thrown up on the wall. Each little painting (they are all only 20 cm by 61 cm) is thus a veritable riot of performative colour: Less is more and, in Smith's hands, less is luscious.

Winter 2009, Vol 25, No 4, pp 121-122.

Laurel Smith’s paintings question excess, finding parallels between our contemporary society of overabundance and the 18th-century rococo style. She has coined the term “Ornaminimalism” to describe the combined references to rococo ornamentation and minimalism in her work. 

    The paintings themselves are based on a motif appropriated from a decorative rococo picture frame. Smith repeats the motif in fragmented form on supports of laser-cut aluminum and Plexiglas of varying sizes. The swirls and curls of the rococo shapes cast shadows within paintings that otherwise keep their hard edges and rectangular shape: The monarchy of the minimal., for instance, adheres to the modernist tenet that a painting is above all a flat, rectilinear surface fastened to the wall at eye level. The colourful and luminous surfaces of Smith’s works are carefully crafted, built from up to 20 successive layers of acrylic paint. In some paintings, such as Bon vivant, Uberous and Voluptuary, the painted layers accumulate like geological strata in the recesses created by the curling shape of the original motif. 

    As a style, rococo was known for its aristocratic abandon. Smith takes the title of Après nous, le déluge (“after me, the deluge”) from an expression attributed to the 18th century French courtesan Madame de Pompadour, who reportedly laughed off all criticism of her extravagance with the eponymous phrase. Smith believes that today’s society of excessive consumption and disposable goods is driven by a similar careless destructiveness. 

   Smith has provided an elegant solution to the question of excess by confining rococo extravagance and her abundantly worked surfaces to austere, industrially made panels. The French theorist Jacques Derrida would describe it as a situation in which excess is sous rature or “under erasure.” The paintings put both of their characteristic elements—rococo excess and the reductivism of minimalism—into this zone of erasure. It is a reminder that the pleasures of excess cannot be simply disavowed and that the reductive purity of minimalism can be a dangerous illusion too.  Instead, we are presented with innovative hybrids and invited to identify connections between past and present art practices. 

   The paintings’ greatest resonance is to be found in those areas of built-up paint that lie within the recesses made by their surface patterning. The paint suggests a condition of being found in between—as it is with our times, which are likewise suspended between no longer and not yet. 

Laurel Smith at Peak Gallery,Toronto;

With her new exhibition, the awkwardly though cleverly named Ornaminimalism, Calgary artist Laurel Smith moves decisively away from the severely lovely, horizontal, wall-mounted, semi-minimalist acrylic-on-Plexiglas lozenges she showed last time out at Peak (I call them "semi-minimalist" only because their highly clarified shapes cast succulently tinted shadows on the gallery walls, shadows that were too luscious for the astringency of minimalism proper). For this current exhibition, she has embraced - almost perversely - a dalliance with the hyper-ornamentalism of the historical Rococo style.

Smith's horizontal Plexiglas lozenge is still there (the bigger works are made of laser-cut aluminum), but now she has cut through them at some midway point and pulled the two halves of the lozenge apart. The cut edges are not, however, clean cuts. On the contrary, the edges are fantastically ornate - a veritable hysteria of eddies and curlicues and introverted complex curves that seems to reference Rococo in its traditionally understood role as purveyor of - as writer Christopher Willard puts it in the accompanying catalogue - "ideas of spirit, sensuous abandon, a carefree pursuit of pleasure, the fleeting nature of romantic love, and indulgent sensuality."

So why would Smith so decisively move from the modernist clarifications of her minimalist bars of painted Plexiglas to hacking them apart, leaving behind these berserk split-ends that writhe out into the gap like candy-coloured tentacles? According to Willard, Smith is neither in retreat from minimalism nor fully in the unthinking embrace of Rococo excessiveness. Her work, he suggests, "reflects more than it critiques." All well and good, but what does it reflect and how? Mostly, I think it valorizes Smith's skill in incorporating the idea of decoration into her work. It exemplifies the way she explores how much decoration she can add before the work heaves a sigh and grows ... well, decorative. And decadent. So far, Smith has been pretty circumspect in her playing of this delicately balanced game. But she's getting awfully close to the abyss.

Laurel Smith is the latest artist to riff on the idea that "God is in the details," a phrase often attributed to the architect Le Corbusier. Or should that be "the devil is in the details?" Smith wonders about that, too. It's the genius of the Calgary-born painter's exhibition, "Ornaminimalism," to create a means for us to think about both possibilities. Is the contemporary desire for the simple life – identified by Smith's minimalist panels of Plexiglas or aluminum – incompatible with the sheer glut of stuff clogging our consumer culture, identified by her Rococo-inflected shredded edges savaging the uninterrupted surface of the panels? 

Sometimes, less is more. That notion is represented in the artwork of Calgary artist Laurel Smith. Born near the Canadian Rockies, Smith’s pieces combine acrylic on Plexiglas, creating clean, minimalist lines that cast shadows of reflected color onto its surrounding walls.

Since completing her MFA at Concordia University, Smith’s work has been shown across Canada, including the Musee d’art Contemporaine in Montreal. Smith also coined the term “Ornaminimalism,” of which her solo exhibit is named after. Smith explains that the term combines “the austerity of 20th century Minimalism and [the] ornate embellishment of 18th century Rococo.” She does this by often applying over twenty different coats of glaze for a dense, multi-layered color surface. And yet, the pieces appear aesthetically minimalist and colourfully simple. Smith’s exhibit at the Peak Gallery this December will further explore her ideas of this concept and will feature new work.

SAINT JOHN, Oct 21/CNW/ - RBC Investments and the Canadian Art Foundation announced Laurel Smith as the Eastern Canadian finalist of the 2004 RBC Investments Canadian Painting Competition. Laurel's original work entitled Sjalso, will compete against the Center and Western Canadian winners of the 2004 painting competition at the national finals in Toronto on November 17, 2004. The winner will receive a $10,000 cash prize and two honourable mentions will each receive a cash prize of $7,000. 

  "The annual RBC Investments Canadian Painting Competition provides an opportunity to celebrare Canada's up-and-coming artists," said Russ Cook, head, Private Banking (Canada), RBC Investments. "It will be a pleasure to have Laurel's work included in the RBC art collection alongside works of the Group of Seven, the Automatistes, Painters Eleven and the Regina Five. 

  Laurel Smith was inspired to paint her winning artwork, Sjalso, while watchin sunsets in Gotland, Sweden. She was intrigued by the translucent light set against an opaque horizon and cloud forms. Laurel builds up more than 20 glazes of paint to a thick luminous surface. This contrasts with hidden bright, often flourescent, paint that reflects colour up and onto the surrounding wall. The contrast of the two seemingly extends the boundaries of the painting. 

There is a more and a less to the work of Laurel Smith. The more is about extending Minimalism into the 21st century. The less (or LS) of Laurel Smith is about her new show, LS is More, at Peak Gallery, through February. 

  American painter Frank Stella famously characterized the Minimalist art movement with the phrase "What you see, is what you see". Minimalism is typically defined by its reductive style, reducing a work of art to the minimum number of colors, values, shapes, lines and textures. Beginning with Russian Constructivists at the turn of the 20th century, the Minimalis movement grew roots in the West in the 1069's. The stripped down, elemental, fundamental style creates immediate visual impact without any particular representational form. Smith's new body of work, extends the Minimalist concept into today's digital age of excell. As Smith herself says, "I believe that minimal painting today is more vibrant and relevant than ever before". 

  The LS is More series is based on pantone colors, each with a unique formulation suggested by reductive titles like "Kerf 1235C230C:812". The paintings are presented as large rectangular color-ships; linear bands of color that stretch beyond the border of the canvas by emitting an intense halo when installed. Each work seems to have an inner light source, seeming to float on the wall, even as the depth of color brings a weighty quality to the paintings. 

  The radiance and glow of Smith's painted surfaces comes from a process of layering over 20 glazes onto plexiglas. The subtle fades, blue and wear of each glaze on top of the other create the richness in simplistic form identified with Minimalism, and certainly a characteristic of Smith's work. 

The works making up her wittily titled exhibition LS is more, the first Toronto solo show by this Calgary-based artist, are like horizontal slabs of gelatin: Thick but evanescent lozenges of saturated colour, the kind of colour that seems to be in perpetual suspension within its matrix. 

  Smith says her slabs glow because of the up to 20 coats of acrylic paint applied to the sheet of Plexiglas that supports them. This buildup of pigment, thicker than anything you'd comfortable refer to as "coats" of pigment, results in the kind of sweet, slick surfaces you associate with the hand-rubbed, infinitely deep, glossy, tangerine-flake surfaces of custom cars. 

  Adding to this deep effulgence, is the fact that Smith bevels some of the edges of her paintings (the paintings all vear the generic title Kerf, which means "the cut or the width of a cut made with an axe saw or cutting tool"), usually the tops or one of the sides. She paints these bevelled edges in an alternate colour from the painting's surface, so that when the gallery lights are trained upond the pictures, you get an attractive flair of extra colour thrown up on the wall. Each little painting (they are all only 20 cm by 61 cm) is thus a veritable riot of performative colour: Less is more and, in Smith's hands, less is luscious.

Winter 2009, Vol 25, No 4, pp 121-122.

Laurel Smith’s paintings question excess, finding parallels between our contemporary society of overabundance and the 18th-century rococo style. She has coined the term “Ornaminimalism” to describe the combined references to rococo ornamentation and minimalism in her work. 

    The paintings themselves are based on a motif appropriated from a decorative rococo picture frame. Smith repeats the motif in fragmented form on supports of laser-cut aluminum and Plexiglas of varying sizes. The swirls and curls of the rococo shapes cast shadows within paintings that otherwise keep their hard edges and rectangular shape: The monarchy of the minimal., for instance, adheres to the modernist tenet that a painting is above all a flat, rectilinear surface fastened to the wall at eye level. The colourful and luminous surfaces of Smith’s works are carefully crafted, built from up to 20 successive layers of acrylic paint. In some paintings, such as Bon vivant, Uberous and Voluptuary, the painted layers accumulate like geological strata in the recesses created by the curling shape of the original motif. 

    As a style, rococo was known for its aristocratic abandon. Smith takes the title of Après nous, le déluge (“after me, the deluge”) from an expression attributed to the 18th century French courtesan Madame de Pompadour, who reportedly laughed off all criticism of her extravagance with the eponymous phrase. Smith believes that today’s society of excessive consumption and disposable goods is driven by a similar careless destructiveness. 

   Smith has provided an elegant solution to the question of excess by confining rococo extravagance and her abundantly worked surfaces to austere, industrially made panels. The French theorist Jacques Derrida would describe it as a situation in which excess is sous rature or “under erasure.” The paintings put both of their characteristic elements—rococo excess and the reductivism of minimalism—into this zone of erasure. It is a reminder that the pleasures of excess cannot be simply disavowed and that the reductive purity of minimalism can be a dangerous illusion too.  Instead, we are presented with innovative hybrids and invited to identify connections between past and present art practices. 

   The paintings’ greatest resonance is to be found in those areas of built-up paint that lie within the recesses made by their surface patterning. The paint suggests a condition of being found in between—as it is with our times, which are likewise suspended between no longer and not yet. 

Laurel Smith at Peak Gallery,Toronto;

With her new exhibition, the awkwardly though cleverly named Ornaminimalism, Calgary artist Laurel Smith moves decisively away from the severely lovely, horizontal, wall-mounted, semi-minimalist acrylic-on-Plexiglas lozenges she showed last time out at Peak (I call them "semi-minimalist" only because their highly clarified shapes cast succulently tinted shadows on the gallery walls, shadows that were too luscious for the astringency of minimalism proper). For this current exhibition, she has embraced - almost perversely - a dalliance with the hyper-ornamentalism of the historical Rococo style.

Smith's horizontal Plexiglas lozenge is still there (the bigger works are made of laser-cut aluminum), but now she has cut through them at some midway point and pulled the two halves of the lozenge apart. The cut edges are not, however, clean cuts. On the contrary, the edges are fantastically ornate - a veritable hysteria of eddies and curlicues and introverted complex curves that seems to reference Rococo in its traditionally understood role as purveyor of - as writer Christopher Willard puts it in the accompanying catalogue - "ideas of spirit, sensuous abandon, a carefree pursuit of pleasure, the fleeting nature of romantic love, and indulgent sensuality."

So why would Smith so decisively move from the modernist clarifications of her minimalist bars of painted Plexiglas to hacking them apart, leaving behind these berserk split-ends that writhe out into the gap like candy-coloured tentacles? According to Willard, Smith is neither in retreat from minimalism nor fully in the unthinking embrace of Rococo excessiveness. Her work, he suggests, "reflects more than it critiques." All well and good, but what does it reflect and how? Mostly, I think it valorizes Smith's skill in incorporating the idea of decoration into her work. It exemplifies the way she explores how much decoration she can add before the work heaves a sigh and grows ... well, decorative. And decadent. So far, Smith has been pretty circumspect in her playing of this delicately balanced game. But she's getting awfully close to the abyss.

Laurel Smith is the latest artist to riff on the idea that "God is in the details," a phrase often attributed to the architect Le Corbusier. Or should that be "the devil is in the details?" Smith wonders about that, too. It's the genius of the Calgary-born painter's exhibition, "Ornaminimalism," to create a means for us to think about both possibilities. Is the contemporary desire for the simple life – identified by Smith's minimalist panels of Plexiglas or aluminum – incompatible with the sheer glut of stuff clogging our consumer culture, identified by her Rococo-inflected shredded edges savaging the uninterrupted surface of the panels? 

Sometimes, less is more. That notion is represented in the artwork of Calgary artist Laurel Smith. Born near the Canadian Rockies, Smith’s pieces combine acrylic on Plexiglas, creating clean, minimalist lines that cast shadows of reflected color onto its surrounding walls.

Since completing her MFA at Concordia University, Smith’s work has been shown across Canada, including the Musee d’art Contemporaine in Montreal. Smith also coined the term “Ornaminimalism,” of which her solo exhibit is named after. Smith explains that the term combines “the austerity of 20th century Minimalism and [the] ornate embellishment of 18th century Rococo.” She does this by often applying over twenty different coats of glaze for a dense, multi-layered color surface. And yet, the pieces appear aesthetically minimalist and colourfully simple. Smith’s exhibit at the Peak Gallery this December will further explore her ideas of this concept and will feature new work.