Lauren Dana Smith
Taos, NM
The Breath of This Place
Acrylic, plaster, gauze, pumice, aluminum, charcoal on aluminum panel
48” x 36”
2022
$3500
About
Lauren Dana Smith (b. 1979, Philadelphia, PA) is a painter, writer and art therapist living in Taos, New Mexico. Smith’s work is held in private collections and has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally. In 2021 she received a SURFACE: Emerging Artist of New Mexico award from the Harwood Art Center in Albuquerque and has also been recognized nationally for her digital art series. Her work has appeared in publications such as Hyperallergic, Art & Cake LA, New Visionary Magazine, ARTWALK magazine and the Santa Fe Literary Review. Smith is an Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, where she also received her M.P.S.; she studied painting and received her B.A. from Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, New York. After more than twenty years living and working in New York, Smith permanently relocated to Taos in 2020. Smith is a co-founding member of the Taos Abstract Artist Collective and co-curator of the Inaugural TAAC exhibition.
Artist Statement
Exploring rupture, repair and the climate of internal place, Lauren Dana Smith’s digital and sculptural paintings represent the linkages between body, land, collective trauma and memory.
Smith’s feminist approach tests the personal boundaries we choose and those we don’t. Her paintings forge inquiries into the impact of personal and collective trauma and transformative experience on the psyche. Each work considers the bodily experience of the land and the mirror it provides to us in times of calm and times of chaos. A viewer may feel that they are simultaneously hovering above the work and suspended inside of it. Smith’s work ultimately invites a path through our intimate interior spaces and along the exterior boundaries of physical form. At play is a steady tension between our inner landscapes and outer environments.
Interested in honoring the depth and narrative of the American Southwest and its parallels to personal and ancestral memory through a contemporary lens, Smith’s work analyzes color, texture, climate and existential presence in a departure from the familiar iconography of traditional Southwestern art.
Art from Lauren Dana Smith in other TAAC exhibitions