Willie Wayne Smith: Tenuous Leisure

Willie is a longtime friend of the gallery and someone in whose work we are deeply invested. His work often takes the form of air brush paintings depicting slightly surreal environments featuring uncanny realism, stark layering, and more recently scrawled and sketched proclamations. The paintings especially feel like scraping the inside of a brain and spreading the contents out onto a surface.

Willie's previous show with Sadie Halie in 2015, 'Consider My Tongue Swallowed', spread out across our old garage space. It utilized the corners, the floor, the ceiling, and the crevices in between to create an environment of trompe l'oeil paint trays, a repulsively beautiful bust, and some paintings that felt almost religious in their use of light.

For 'Tenuous Leisure', Willie will present primarily new paintings housed in a site specific treatment of the space. His new work uses the visual language of puzzles to break apart the picture plane and further layer his already complex and personal narratives.

'Tenuous Leisure' will run from August 4th - September 28th with an opening reception on August 4th from 7-10 pm.