Image: Ty Smith, Summer Drawing #6, 2015; graphite on paperAn exhibition of graphite works by Ty Smith will be featured the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Project Space from Jan. 18-31, with a free opening reception from 6-8 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 19.
The College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Art and Art History, where Smith is an adjunct professor, presents the exhibition.
“Ty Smith: Forty-Nine Drawings” surveys nearly all of the drawings the artist has made in the past year and a half since moving to Birmingham from Auburn, Alabama. Through these small-scale graphite works, Smith focuses on the relationship between action and thought, and the ways in which active thought and thoughtful action play important roles in his image-making process. Each work in the exhibition is drawn within a linear structure based on a perspective frame. The linear division provides Smith with a “visual web” within which to make changes and additions, and allows him freedom to follow intuition and experimentation through the series.
The timing of the creation of these drawings also coincides with the recent birth of Smith’s son. Through their small size and in the artist’s tender mark-making, Smith relates the works to the experience he had in holding his baby boy. “Forty-Nine Drawings” demands an intimate exchange, expressing both a sensitive and an expansive experience and providing opportunity – for both the artist and the viewer – to consider poetic relationships between routine and uncertainty, tension and light.
Smith is a native of Montgomery. He graduated from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 2001 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. While working on his undergraduate degree, Smith studied with Professor Alvin C. Sella. In 2006, Smith moved to Oklahoma, where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Tulsa in 2009. In Tulsa, he studied with painter Mark Lewis, as well as artists Deborah Kahn and Stanley Lewis, during a summer program at the Chautauqua School of Art.
Project Space, located on the ground floor of the UAB Humanities Building at 900 13th St. South, is an adaptive gallery space that provides an alternative platform for UAB students, faculty and community to engage teaching, research, public service and visual art practices.
Project Space is open from noon-2 p.m. on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, or by appointment. For questions, to schedule use of Project Space or to arrange a visit, contact Project Space director Jared Ragland at Raglandj@uab.edu.