SMILE!

The smile communicates a variety of things to many different people. Whether signaling inner happiness or serving as a social emotional response, it can evoke an immediate reaction. In the context of contemporary art, although a smile is reflexively construed by the viewer as positive, many artists leverage this expectation to offer interpretations that branch in a multitude of directions. It is in this context that we present SMILE!, featuring eight contemporary artists who explore these varied approaches and interpretations in their work.

Evoking childhood and a youthful spirit, Mike Swaney’s work blurs the line between high art and naïve play. His inventive use of ceramic shards to build vibrant mosaics disarms at first glance, only to reveal a subtle balance of poetic sensibility and humor. In a similar vein, Susan Carr’s young girls feature euphoric, frozen smiles that radiate an initial sense of joy, yet are subtly subverted by dense, accumulated pigment that suggests an inner turmoil hidden behind the mask.

This subtle sense of terror lurking behind a grin also percolates through the work of Jonathan Edelhuber and Tim Biskup, whose grimacing figures remain firmly rooted in a pop-cultural aesthetic that feels simultaneously humorous and frightening.

When encountering the glass works of Finn O’Sullivan, the smile is deployed in its purest form, operating within a space of pure delight. Their dazzling simplicity of form and vibrant color stands as a testament to happiness, accentuated by shapes that evoke the innate pleasure of eating.

Meanwhile, Dan McCarthy and Beni Bischoff use emoji-like smiles to underscore an irony of convenience, treating the smile as a stand-in for deeper emotional complexities that contemporary culture rarely allows. Finally, the artist Bijijoo approaches the smile as an expression of human transcendence, capturing an internal life force filtered through the prism of knowledge and enlightenment.

When the concept for this exhibition first came to me, my initial reaction was to dismiss it as too silly or absurd. But I soon realized that its absurdity was precisely what made it compelling: shattering the assumption that featuring a smile in art might be simply frivolous or limited to a straightforward expression of happiness. Instead, I took it as a challenge to lean into that frivolity—to highlight the tendency to dismiss it as a pretext for limiting our perceptions of what is serious, and to reshape our perspectives on what is meaningful.