Courtney Smith
2007
Paraparquetry
Furniture Fragments and Birch Plywood / Dimensions Variable detail
Courtney Smith’s conceptually incisive sculptures transcend their Minimalist roots by delighting in the intellectual practice of conjugating order and disorder. Feminine in their attention to pattern and repetition, but fearless in their constructive rigor, these works achieve a coy but intelligent sensuality.
Known for her complex pieces of deconstructed/reconstructed furniture, Smith has now split her work in two directions. The first, a series composed of the breakdown of whole furniture pieces into a myriad of modular parts, which then serve as building materials; the other, by contrast, introduces uniform, fixed constructions as newborn objects of furniture. The resulting works stand in opposition to one another, in color, form and concept, but come together to compose a hard-edged, chimerical world of domestic equipment.