It’s a playfully fluid agnosticism toward a single vision of linearity – or, in Smith’s words, a “collapsing of time” – born in part out of Smith’s move west six years ago, where the “perpetual spring” of Los Angeles sharply contrasts her native East Coast’s normative cycles of dormancy and reemergence. Smith even points to yet another geography with its own transformative chronology: that of her own body. “There are studies that show that different parts of our bodies regenerate altogether. You have a whole new skin.”

The exceptionally molten MIDNIGHT IN MY GARDEN evokes the shared cycles of fertility between nature and human anatomy, concentrating its rich fabric collage at the painting’s center crease. Another, entitled AND FINALLY HE WAS A FLOWER IN BLOOM, evokes the quotidian barriers that interfere with this transformative impulse – and our ability to overcome. In it, a recognizable, striped suit tie sweeps the canvas’s right side, emblematic of what Smith sees as a “stiff upper lip, buttoned up thing” and a nod to Smith’s first career as a professional theatrical costumer, yet it unfurls in fluid motion across a splashing backdrop of amorphous color. “The gesture,” Smith explains “is like the unraveling of spring with flowers. Like someone whipping their tie off and becoming more free.”