Brady Smith: Sitting Together

Kin Studio and Gallery

4725 16th Street, Studio 104, Boulder, CO 80304

December 6, 2024–January 30, 2025

Admission: Free

Review by Parker Yamasaki

Have a seat. Grab a chair. You’re going to want to sit down for this.

There’s a reason that we reach for furniture when hard news is coming. The standing body is precarious, wrapped in air, and prone to crumbling. The seated body, though, is supported. It can take more. This is what Brady Smith’s new show Sitting Together at Kin Studio and Gallery feels like: support.

An installation view of Brady Smith’s *Sitting Together* exhibition. Image courtesy of Kin Studio and Gallery.

Smith has been vocal about his struggles with mental health. His 2021 show at the Arvada Center explored social perceptions of suicide and his current show features a mixture of works addressing depression and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. But while some art feels like an expulsion of anxieties from the artist to the canvas, and eventually to the viewer, Smith’s pieces have a calming effect—more like the coping or the aftermath. The residue of a catastrophe that has come and gone.

Brady Smith, *Arrangement: For Support*, 2021, graphite on paper, 38 x 50 inches. Image courtesy of Kin Studio and Gallery.

Central to the exhibition is Arrangement: For Support (2021), a large graphite drawing of metal folding chairs arranged in a circle. In a way it’s a still life, but in another it’s a post-life. There are echoes of a 12-step meeting in a church basement reverberating through the empty space around the chairs. A lush, blue couch is placed in the gallery directly opposite the piece, allowing the viewer to sink into comfortable contemplation (no posture-bending, flat wooden benches here), to take a load off, to feel secure.

Even though Smith has been making these works for years, they take on a new relevance shown during the months between the election and inauguration.

Brady Smith, *The Barbosa Twins*, 2019, acrylic on panel, 18 x 32 inches. Image courtesy of Kin Studio and Gallery.

Around the country major mainstream news outlets are reporting on their own slumps. The Washington Post published an article in late November with the headline, “The latest news? Not right now, thanks.” [1] The idea the Post is running with—although, at the time of writing, a still unsubstantiated claim—is that people are feeling so overwhelmed and over-informed about the national election that they are turning off notifications and tuning out the news as a form of self-preservation.

Brady Smith, *Arrangement: For Instruction*, 2021, graphite on paper, 30 x 44 inches. Image courtesy of Kin Studio and Gallery.

This is a notably different collective reaction than after the 2016 election, when many media outlets experienced a surge in subscribers that became known colloquially as “the Trump bump.” [2]

But those in the Post article, and others like it, are testing out silence this time around. In some ways it’s a reversal of melancholy in the mental health sense—rather than an involuntary descent into the darker aspects of the human experience, some people are seeking them out as an insulated space from the loud and bright now times.

This collective “cocooning,” as one person in the Post article labeled it, has everything to do with the timelines of Smith’s show. Despite the fact that he created these works during a roughly 5-year period of time, between 2016-2021, and despite the fact that Allyson McDuffie—the artist-owner of Kin Studio—couldn’t have known the results of the presidential election or its tumultuous runup back when she planned the show, its subtle messages about care—whether through community or solitude—land at just the right time.

A series of small oil paintings with intriguing titles like If I Cheer the Other Team (2018) and It Could Have Been Brilliant (2016) seem particularly well-situated for the moment.

Brady Smith, *Or Are You Scared?*, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 16 inches. Image courtesy of Kin Studio and Gallery.

Brady Smith, *It Never Seems to Do You Good*, 2018, acrylic on panel, 12 x 16 inches. Image courtesy of Kin Studio and Gallery.

The series is a study of household items, including the typical motifs of a still life—flora, vases, water—arranged into daring little structures, charming and quiet with a dangerous proximity to collapse. In It Never Seems to Do You Good (2018), Smith depicts a lemon with a loose loop of black thread around it, suspended off the ground. A pair of tiny rocks appears to hold the string in place. In Or Are You Scared? (2017) a knife is strung up by a similar black string, which is wrapped around what looks like a thumbtack and taped to the wall with a single piece of masking tape.

A view of three works in Brady Smith’s *Sitting Together* exhibition. Image courtesy of Kin Studio and Gallery.

These are still lives in a literal sense. Still, as in, the items are balanced, hung, secured into place. Life, as in, the stickiness of the tape will eventually wear off, a sharp wind will blow, leaves will wilt, rocks will be kicked, a cat may come by and decide to intervene. But for now, the lemon is locked in, the knife is secure. For now, we have the stillness of a between time. Take a breath, and a seat.

Parker Yamasaki is a western states arts writer based in Lafayette, Colorado. She is a culture reporter for the statewide, nonprofit newsroom The Colorado Sun. She is also a freelance critic. Her work has been published in The Chicago Reader, Newcity Chicago, Austin Monthly, and various online publications.

[1] See https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/11/24/news-quitting-shutting-off/ and https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/15/trump-presidency-liberal-media-resistance-00189655.

[2] See https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/business/media/trump-newspapers-cable-news-audience.html.

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