Kim Smith Claudel - Playground

EXHIBITION DATES: April 1 - 26, 2025

RECEPTION: Thursday, April 3, 5 - 8 pm

Closing RECEPTION: Saturday, april26, 4 - 6 pm

Playground brings together a series of recent paintings by Portland-based artist Kim Smith Claudel.

The playground is a stage for imaginative theories. With endless freedom inside its boundary, it is both hyper-real and simultaneously detached from real world-ness. For Smith Claudel, painting abstraction is her playground—a space of not only invention and discovery but also risk and failure.

These paintings, omnivorous with media and indifferent to craft, bring urgency and purpose amid a dance of action and reaction. Layers are masked and covered, scraped and excavated through a collaborative game that is invented as it goes.

These paintings are about play within ground—the space in which figures can fit and drift, float and fall—held weightless by the impossible gravity within a painting. Soft gradients like desert sunsets are cut with harsh lines, blurring our perception of figure and ground, near and far, beginning and end. Stenciled remnants hide and reveal awkward colors that are at times earthly, and at other times garish. Like play structures, these collaged constructions question pragmatic function. A bar to climb and swing, a mound to meander, a beam to teeter—the playgrounds are spaces to get lost in thought and play amid their provisional stability, knowing we could lose our footing at any moment—though we may fall softly on the sand.

Kim Smith Claudel is an interdisciplinary artist working in both painting and mixed media installation. She was a visual resident at the Boston Center for the Arts, a research artist at the MIT Media Lab, and recently an artist in residence at Building 5 at Northwest Marine Art Works (Portland, OR). Currently, she is a member of Carnation Contemporary Gallery and the artist collective, WAVE Contemporary. She holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and an MS from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Recent solo exhibitions include KyotoBA (Kyoto, Japan), Carnation Contemporary (Portland, OR), and Mt Hood Community College (Gresham, OR). She lives and works in Portland, OR.