Kiki Smith
Kiki Smith was born in 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany. The daughter of American sculptor Tony Smith, Kiki Smith grew up in New Jersey. As a young girl, one of Smith’s first experiences with art was helping her father make cardboard models for his geometric sculptures. This training in formalist systems, combined with her upbringing in the Catholic Church, would later resurface in Smith’s evocative sculptures, drawings, and prints. The recurrent subject matter in Smith’s work has been the body as a receptacle for knowledge, belief, and storytelling.
“Basically, I think art is just a way to think,” remarks Kiki Smith, “it’s like standing in the wind and letting it pull you in whatever direction it wants to go.”
Adept in bronze, wax, textiles, and printmaking, the segment follows Smith on a journey through a diversity of narrative subjects including witches, saints, death, animals, family members, domestic objects, and dolls.
Smith explains her relationship to meaning in her work: “I’d rather make something that’s very open-ended that can have a meaning to me, but then it also can have a meaning to somebody else who can fill it up with their meaning.”
Louise Despont
Louise Despont was born in 1983 in New York; she lives and works in New York and in Bali, Indonesia. Since discovering the potential of working with pencil and architectural stencils on paper, Despont has adopted an intuitive process in which she allows her drawings to develop as she creates them, resulting in an almost devotional object comprised of dense colors and shapes. Having collected images for many years, Despont complements her broad visual references with her interest in energy and spirituality.
How deeply can a place permeate an artwork? A native New Yorker now working in Bali, Louise Despont shares how her adopted island home shapes her intensive practice, informing the devotional, meditative, and fragile elements of her drawings. “I know that the most important thing to make good work is time and space,” says the artist, “and living in Bali, that’s where I was going to have the most of it.”
While the spirituality of Bali aligned with Despont’s aesthetic, the tropical climate made her drawings vulnerable—a problem she solved with a dehumidified case. The artist herself was in a vulnerable place when she first arrived on the island in 2016, at the time of film; a long-standing relationship ended after they had moved to Bali together. “I wasn’t sure how I could make the work not being in love,” she says, but she soon found that her drawing practice sustained her. “Me in the studio with paper was there whether or not I was in a relationship.”
For her 2016 exhibition at The Drawing Center in New York City, Despont created an immersive drawing that imagines energy as a physical body, documenting its lifecycle from embryo to “a return to formlessness.” Conceptual artist Aaron Taylor Kuffner‘s gamelatron—a robotic version of the traditional Balinese orchestra, the gamelan—transformed the space into a sanctuary, and gave viewers the opportunity to, as Despont puts it, “travel through the drawings in their mind.”