Geoffrey Todd Smith creates complex, rule-based abstractions that place him firmly within the orbit of modern American art, but with a wandering eye to the future. His vision is guided by self-imposed limitations that instill order to an otherwise meandering dream-like process. The result is a stylish eruption of concentrated color and form, enveloped in a hand-drawn web of doodled spikes and ruffles and embedded with a rhythmic plague of polka dotted interference. The playfully constructed titles for each work provide an additional climate of atmosphere and mood without completely revealing a narrative. Smith works with a range of media including gel pens, graphite, collage, enamel paint, acrylic and oil.
For his 16-year survey at (northern) Western Exhibitions, the gallery commissioned an essay by Dominic Molon, the Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art at the RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island. From an excerpt of “A dot, a line, and a pattern walk into a bar …” Molon writes:
A painting such as Show Me All of Your Piercings and I’ll Tell You All of My Dreams possesses a stoic restraint in its use of white, black, gold, gray, and brown, and tightly alternating patterns. Contrast this with the fluidity and off-centeredness of Unmemorable Tryst with a Hypnotist, which layers differently patterned circular, ovoid, sunburst, and square forms (among others) with curving lines of varying thickness in a seemingly inchoate jumble. Philip Glass meets David Lee Roth … Stephen Wright meets Sam Kinison … Michael Snow meets Mel Brooks and so on. Smith fascinatingly alternates the personality of his paintings within his own oeuvre, making the inconsistency of their temperament and tone an absolute constant in his practice.
Geoffrey Todd Smith (b. 1973, Cleveland, OH) has work in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago, U.S. Department of State in Washington, DC, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Hallmark Inc., The Progressive Insurance Art Collection, Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, Soho House Chicago, the South Bend Art Museum in Indiana, and Harper College in Illinois. His work has been shown at the Indianapolis Museum of Art; Hyde Park Art Center, The Union League, DePaul Art Museum and Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago; Luis de Jesus Gallery and Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles; The Hughes Gallery in Australia; The Green Gallery and Real Tinsel in Milwaukee; TOA Presents in Minneapolis; Left Field in Los Osos, CA; The Front in New Orleans; Illinois State Museum, and the Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois. His work has been written about in Hyperallergic, The New Criterion, New City, The Seen, New American Paintings, Bad at Sports, art ltd, Juxtapoz, Chicago Tribune, and Chicago Magazine. Smith is represented by Western Exhibitions and lives and works in Chicagoland.