Jaune Quick-To-See Smith is an enrolled member of the Flathead Nation in western Montana, the oldest tribe in the state, located in the plateau region for over 12,000 years. For all the primal nature of her origins, Smith adeptly takes on contemporary American society in her paintings, drawings and prints, looking at things Native and national through bifocals of the old and the new, the sacred and the profane, the divine and the witty.
A typical piece is the 60-by-50-inch Not Out of the Woods (1996), consisting of oil, collage and mixed mediums on canvas. Central to the work is a big fir tree defined by hastily applied daubs of paint. Snippets of advertising copy--"SALE," "Pay Now, Save Later" and "Miracle Mop" among them--coexist with squarish washes of beige, a very light green and, around the trunk, a fiery copper. The juxtaposition of an archetypal "green and growing thing" with the visual debris of contemporary culture suggests that, although Smith has absorbed much from the ironic stance of '60s Pop art, her sensibility is purely her own.
It was an attitude that kept viewers engaged through four rooms of works executed since the artist established herself in her first New York exhibition, in 1979. The years have seen changes: the size of her pieces has increased, collage has become a major modus, and she has turned to mature sociopolitical commentary in her maps, for instance, of the last decade. With a low bow to Jasper Johns, Smith's maps seem, on the surface, to be epic re-picturings of the continental U.S., energetic and vitalized, perhaps a bit satiric. On second thought, they may have much to do with the artist's concerns with tribal land ownership. A recent map work titled Memory (2000) may refer to racial memories: superimposed over a 3-by-4-foot outline of the states are Native American pictographs that take us back to ancient ways.
Smith isn't necessarily saying where her biases lie; she has, further, adopted the universal modernist painterly "hand" of such titans as Kandinsky and Klee to ensure the comprehensibility and integrity of her vision. That vision can be comic: Double Acting (1996) features an Indian-head chieftain advertising a new, "double acting" baking powder that might be referring in some way to Smith's "double-acting" attitude toward old and new America. More to the point, however, may be those works in the show in which Smith visibly takes pride in her heritage. One such is Flathead Vest (1996), which, while drawing inspiration from both the image of Mickey Mouse and a label for Red Man Pears, makes a lovely, lyrical subject out of the tracing of a Native American woman's vest over all other sorts of collaged bric-a-brac. A new dignity has entered the scene, which can subsume the harsher facts and still flourish.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group
