SLOW WALK

This January, Saint Cloche kicks off the new year with SLOW WALK, a solo show by emerging artist, Luciana Smith.

Luciana Smith is a Sydney based artist, with a background in photography, film, painting and graphic design. She received a Bachelor of Arts/Fine Arts at UNSW Art & Design in 2015 and since graduating has exhibited in a number of shows and was selected as a finalist in the 2017 and 2018 Waverley Art Prize.

Working with acrylic paint on canvas and painting from photographs taken on her phone, Luciana reanimates her surroundings with bold colour as a means of examining the every day.

“Slow Walk” is inspired by Luciana’s time spent living in Italy where she documented her surroundings in an attempt to capture mundane, in-between places that act as a window into every day life. Set against the backdrop of Italian architecture and interiors, this body of work explores a fascination with how urban landscapes are shaped over time and reflect the lived experience of people.

“I decided to move to Florence for 6 months because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do and knew that there were Italian themes in my work that I needed to explore further. I was working as a freelance graphic designer and luckily found a studio not long after moving there called CURA Art Lab in Santa Croce. The studio was on the bottom floor of a 16th century palazzo, it used to be a small hospital but has now been converted into a multidisciplinary art space with room for about 15 people. I shared one room with 3 other artists and spent almost every day there working and painting. I was living and working in the Santa Croce area which is right near the Duomo and Sant’Ambrogio Markets. I could walk everywhere I wanted to go and it was on these walks that I collected all my painting material.”

The paintings are a collection of opportunistic snapshots, wandering through streets and rooms with a sense of nostalgia and showing us the hidden corners that act as the fabric for a city’s character. She is drawn to scenes that have painterly qualities when framed in a certain way, as the imperfections and passing shadows within architectural settings often create compositions that emulate abstract paintings with unintentional forms.

The subjects within the work appear by chance and It’s in these fleeting moments where she also seeks out the strange and humour within day-to-day life, examining people and animals in a skewed and playful manner.