Creative Dialogues: An Afternoon with Rhonda Smith

Join us in-person at Kingston Gallery for an afternoon with Rhonda Smith during her Main Gallery exhibition at Kingston Gallery, . This event offers a unique opportunity to engage directly with Smith about her sculptures and installations that reflect on the relatonship of human and nature.

derives from various influences: sea tales, myths, poems, industrial and natural elements, medieval imagery, photographs, and contemporary statistics. These influences emerge during the creation of each piece. Rhonda Smith relies on the tactile process of shaping, molding, and assembling materials to give form to her ideas. Initial concepts often remain skeletal or merely impulsive, while the true essence of a piece develops through the tactile process of listening to what her hands transmute.

The sculptures and installations, with their broad mix of materials and techniques, represent both disappearance and appearance—experiences that are simultaneously deeply satisfying and fragile; Will humans disappear and nature survive? Is our possibility now in recognizing absence? Smith remains increasingly aware that, in the face of crumbling realities, only her openness to the undiscovered will have significance. For her, this is what art can achieve: guiding us towards new ground.

has been immersed in visual study all her adult life. She graduated from St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY, and studied at the School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Cooperativa Mosaicisti, Ravenna Italy. She is currently a member of the Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA and the Pell Lucy Collective/Shim Art Network, and on the board of Transcultural Exchange. She was a painter until about seven years ago when she turned to sculpture and installation. Her work incorporates her abiding love of science, the land and water, and the sacred. The idea in science that any dynamic system can be in disequilibrium is an underlying concept in her work and process. Of particular concern now is that our planet has lost its wild spaces, we are in a continual state of displacement, and too many species have disappeared. On the other side of these tragedies is the aspiration for presence and the ineffable in any artwork. The Tibetan Buddhist concept resonates: that each phenomenon, physical or spiritual, has four levels: the outer, the inner, the secret, and the ultimately secret.

Host or Publisher Kingston Gallery