Melon Skin
Karinne Smith

Our private lives — our fantasies, rituals, and identities — are increasingly mortgaged to create our public personas. In Karinne Smith’s work, this give-and-take leaves a void which language cannot fill. Family histories and cherished memories are shown to be as malleable as fondant and as porous as the surface of a cantaloupe. Her works complicate a conventional understanding of genre, finding terror in the romantic and the grotesque in conventional beauty. Stripped of our ability to divorce pleasure from repulsion, the fecund from the putrid, we are led to the uneasy realization that horror is a genre through which we can remake the world. 

Recent works have used found photos as points of departure: emotional documents which, in the hands of the artist, are both detached from their original meaning and open to new narratives and associations. The artist combines material experimentation with ideas of femininity, adolescence, and domesticity in an installation which ultimately pushes the viewer toward a visceral sensory experience, one wrought with overabundance.