Tenuous Leisure at Sadie Halie Projects
Tenuous Leisure
August 2018
Sadie Halie Projects
Minneapolis, MN
SADIE HALIE PROJECTS is joyful about presenting a new body of work from Michigan based artist Willie Wayne Smith. Willie is a longtime friend of the gallery and someone in whose work we are deeply invested. His work often takes the form of air brush paintings depicting slightly surreal environments featuring uncanny realism, stark layering, and more recently scrawled and sketched proclamations. His installations feel like scraping the inside of a brain and spreading the contents out onto a surface.
Willie's previous show with Sadie Halie in 2015, 'Consider My Tongue Swallowed', spread out across our old garage space. It utilized the corners, the floor, the ceiling, and the crevices in between to create an environment of trompe l'oeil paint trays, a repulsively beautiful bust, and some paintings that felt almost religious in their use of light.
For 'Tenuous Leisure', Willie is presenting new paintings housed in a site specific treatment of the space. All of the paintings sit on a light to dark treatment of the walls, the center point of which is a gleaming sun. It feels like an easy way out to suggest that someone’s work might be about everything but there is some truth to it here. The painting on the wall begins to lay the groundwork for that, conjuring notions of the universe, the span of a day, a week, a month. Time in general and the passing of it. That combined with images that feel fragmentary but also almost archival, his work could be construed as being about memory. On the contrary, Willie’s narrative language takes the notions of memory and experience as a starting point and employs it as a material to construct very immediate and active images and forms.
Two of his newer paintings, a diptych, use the visual language of puzzles to break apart the picture plane and further layer his narratives. In contrast to the other large works in the show, the characters in these paintings emerge more defined and clear but also, in one instance, their heads wrenched and possibly in pain. The twisting facial expression could be read as a freeze frame of a vigorously shaking head or a motion like a sneeze. One of the few instances where we involuntarily lose control.
A central feature of the vast amount of Willie’s work is the depiction of people. Willie’s characters have always been around to varying degrees of visibility. In older work, he has depicted himself as a Gollum-esque monster, family members crammed into tiny spaces, anonymous men and women staring you down, and general casts of half formed humans. They are surrogates for others in his life but they also allow the viewer to place themselves in what can often be chaotic scenes. It often feels as though we are looking in or spying on someone, seeing them in a position where they may not realize they are vulnerable. In this way the works inspire empathy. How do we care about each other in a stream of noise and stress, where it feels as though we might be second to inanimate concerns? And here is where the title of the show gets complicated, how exactly are we meant to relax when the expectations for our lives are precariously managed by those who we might not realize see what we cannot?