Emily Mae Smith: Transit of Venus at Petzel

Emily Mae Smith's Transit of Venus is on view at Petzel, 520 West 25th Street in Chelsea, through October 24. It is her second solo show with the gallery.

Smith was born in Austin, Texas, in 1979 and now lives and works in Upstate New York. In 2024 the Magritte Museum in Brussels staged a survey of her work alongside paintings by René Magritte. Earlier institutional solo shows include Le Consortium in Dijon (2018), the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford (2019), the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah (2020) and Pond Society in Shanghai (2023). Her work belongs to the collections of the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, Harvard Art Museums, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, LACMA and the Hirshhorn, among others.

In the new paintings, her recurring cast of an anthropomorphic broomstick, grapes, eyeballs and open-mouthed frames shifts again, becoming part human, part animal and part plant. These trickster-like forms resist fixed identity and act as propositions more than metaphors. They push back against the structures that tie labor to class and gender, whether through historical convention or present-day social and political conditions.

The title carries several meanings: the astronomical transit, the depiction of the female body in painting, and the mythic Venus as a figure of connection and nature's creative force. Smith draws on her surroundings and on the imagery of earlier eras of upheaval, including the agricultural scenes of Jean-François Millet, whom she has returned to throughout her career.

In The Locust II, the broomstick becomes a near-human figure rising from straw and carrying a scythe. It reverses the passive nineteenth-century nude that inspired it: the figure looks back and takes up the blade, so the object of the gaze becomes an agent. In Only Human, a cluster of bright grapes, each carrying one eyeball, searches anxiously for its neighbor's gaze. The picture questions ocularcentrism, the Western habit of treating sight as the main route to knowledge, and suggests that selfhood is negotiated through a gaze that cannot be escaped.

Smith moves between Pop, Symbolist and Surrealist vocabularies, building her surfaces from layered transparent washes and glazes. The show includes oil paintings on linen, from small 11½ by 9 inch panels to the 90-inch-tall Venus (Inner Vision), plus two carved oak benches, Harvesters Bench (Dawn) and Harvesters Bench (Dusk).