Walter Smith
Legend

Curated by Bryce Grates

May 17 – June 23, 2019
Opening Reception, May 17, 6-9 pm

Interstate Projects is pleased to present Legend, a solo exhibition by Walter Smith. Legend studies latent content in four-quadrant movies, in order to question the way stories are told to global audiences.

Central to the exhibition are Smith’s recent Rag Cinema works, which follow a system of hand-rendered script that is painted into a field of visual signifiers. The images act as the ground for the overlapping text and take form as painted elements, collaged photography, and drawing. The cotton rag surface of the work functions as a screen and a projector.

Also on view are two new works on canvas, titled Family Healthy and Heroes of the Grand Pacification. The paintings are comprised of solid blocks of color that are painted alongside of latex-printed film stills. Each slab of paint indexes the dominant color of an individual frame from the movie. A Java-based processing program takes each still from the given film and compresses its average color into a swatch, creating a timeline of the spectrum of colors used throughout the motion picture.

Walter Smith (b. 1980) is an artist and writer based in New York. Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at Bridget Donahue (New York), Svetlana (New York), and Monitor Gallery (Rome). Recent group exhibitions include White Columns (New York), David Lewis Gallery (New York), Viafarini (Milan), Socrates Sculpture Park (New York), Cleopatra’s (New York), and Night Gallery (Los Angeles). Recent texts include Morelocks: Shadi Habib Allah, Bonnefantenmuseum (Maastricht), On Painting, Skins, 2nd Cannons Publications (Los Angeles), and Empire State, Rizzoli Publishing/ Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome).

Bryce Grates (b. 1993) is an independent curator and arts professional based in Queens, New York.