Surround Sound opens April 5th at FWCAC

April 4, 2019April 3, 2019 Kim Nguyen Fort Worth Community Arts Center, Fort Worth TX, FWCAC, Rachel Wolfson Smith, reception, Surround Sound

Through imagery of dense landscapes, crashed cars, jotted notes, and pulses of color, Wolfson explores themes of time and visual-noise.

For more information, visit www.fwcac.com

Surround Sound by Rachel Wolfson Smith

April 5 – April 26, 2019 RECEPTION: Friday, April 5, 2019 @ 6 PM – 9 PM, Fort Worth Community Arts Center, Fort Worth

Artist Statement

Wolfson’s drawings fluctuate. Moving between keen observation, and a frenzied, deeplyemotive response to environment, they resolve into a hum that articulates the relationship between external and internal realities. To build such complicated resonances, Wolfson layers fragments of highly rendered imagery, broad gestural marks, tessellated patterns, and written sentences across sprawling, tension-driven compositions.

Through imagery of dense landscapes, crashed cars, jotted notes, and pulses of color, Wolfson explores themes of time and visual-noise. The common threads shared by these subjects are instances when order and entropy can trade places with one another by the slightest shift in mental perspective. One might read the spreading of tangled ivy into negative space as clarity at risk of being overtaken — yet through Wolfson’s clever balancing act, that same imagery can invert itself, the negative space suddenly embodying the entropic, and the plant life merely following its genetic pattern with unrivaled precision to bring a sensible order to the untamed chaotic void. The entire contradiction of its interpretation rests on the cognitive equivalent of squinting one’s eyes.

Artist Bio

Rachel Wolfson Smith is an Austin, TX based artist known for her large-scale graphitedrawings. She exhibits nationally and internationally, most recently at the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art in CA and at ICOSA gallery in TX. Wolfson is a 2018 alumni of The Contemporary Austin’s Crit Group, and has been a resident artist at the Austin Fire Department, Halka Sanat and the Babyan Culture House in Turkey. Grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the Awesome Foundation, and the City of Austin have helped fund these initiatives. She received her BFA from MICA and her MFA from Indiana University, both in painting. In April 2019 Wolfson begins her artist residency at 100W Corsicana, and her exhibition “Surround Sound” opens at the Fort Worth Arts Center.