The writings of the Situationists on psychogeographical mapping served as a jumping off point for her recent year-long odyssey to Paris and other European cities to create works incorporating some of the locations that inspired these concepts. In her wanderings (dérives) through unfamiliar places, the artist gathered impressions of physical space, the residue of history, related emotional states, synchronicities and other details to map a specific place, time and point of view. The finished works are delicate, highly detailed paintings on paper incorporating images and texts rendered in ink, pencil, watercolor, rubber stamping and collage. Smith’s faintly biomorphic forms are somewhat reminiscent of medical illustration, antique cartography and mystical diagrams, yet are something else entirely.
Smith’s mappings are not exclusively anchored in external geography. In other works, such as Schizoanalysis, she organizes and analyzes texts, and maps their intersections with her own thoughts. The results are a highly individual infiltration of mapping into the fluid and mysterious regions of the mind.
As critic Benjamin Sutton has stated, “Smith's mind maps underline how we make sense of our accelerated and dematerialized interactions in elaborate, self-reflexive spatial terms. Maps grow more important as our trajectories become increasingly unclear.”
Patricia Smith has exhibited widely in the US and internationally, including recent exhibitions at Broadcast Gallery in Dublin, Ireland, Housatonic Museum in Bridgeport, CT, Voorkamer in Lier, Belgium, Bob Rauschenberg Gallery in Fort Meyers, FL and other venues in Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Montreal. Her work has been reviewed in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Art in America, the LA Times and L Magazine. In 2013 she was awarded a six-month residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. This May she will be an artist in residence at Stichting Kaus Australis in Rotterdam. Smith lives and works in New York.
