LONDON.- Timothy Taylor opened Lands Abroad, the gallery’s debut solo exhibition of work by Paul Anthony Smith in London. Centring on two bodies of work, the ongoing Dreams Deferred and the new Jamaica Paintings, the exhibition presents recent paintings alongside a group of works on paper, marking the artist’s first engagement with the medium. Together, these works examine postcolonial cultural identity, diaspora, and landscape.
In his work, Smith examines the landscape through the lens of intersecting, and often competing, cultural narratives. Drawing on his experiences of home in Jamaica, where he was born, and the United States, where he has spent much of his life, he considers how belonging, exclusion, migration, and travel shape our relationship to both built and natural environments. Inspired by the work of Jamaican British cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who wrote on the mutable construction of cultural identity, Smith’s ongoing series Dreams Deferred presents scenes of lush gardens, viewed from both inside and outside their cultivated boundaries. These works evoke questions of access, protection, and care, inviting reflection on what the natural spaces around us reveal about ourselves.
Two works from Dreams Deferred are presented here, for the first time, on a mirror support. Verdant fields bursting with wildflowers are seen through a chain-link fence that abstracts and partially obscures the view. Though once fully painted, portions of the fence have been undone, allowing its form to reappear. In these exposed passages, viewers glimpse themselves within the fence’s silhouette, prompting reflection on enclosures—whether one is welcomed or excluded, free, or constrained..
In four paintings belonging to another body of work within the Dreams Deferred series, exuberant branches of cherry blossoms reach upward toward crisp, near-monochromatic skies. Growing up in Miami, Smith was unfamiliar with seasonal change. After moving to New York, he began to associate the shifts of the northern climate—and particularly spring, when cherry trees bloom—with a sense of opportunity. He references the work of photographer Bill Cunningham, whose images reflected fashion’s relationship to the changing seasons in New York. Smith uses cerulean and mustard-yellow skies to evoke the emotional resonance of the natural world—its promise of renewal or a sense of eternal spring.
Smith’s new series Jamaica Paintings features semi-abstracted beach scenes from Jamaica’s Frenchman’s Cove on the island’s northeastern coast, captured from multiple perspectives. Each painting aligns crystalline skies with shimmering water, while sand appears soft, marbled in places with shadows of ornate foliage. Smith visited the site frequently as a child and has returned since to document subtle and significant changes to the landscape—where there was once a battle between the British and the French and a resort popular in the 1960s drove Jamaica’s tourism industry. Rendered with an uncanny synthesis of distance and intimacy, these paintings convey layers of personal memory and cultural history, holding nostalgia and immediate perception in tandem.
Paul Anthony Smith (b. 1988, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica) is a New York-based artist whose work explores themes of post-diasporic identity, community, and cultural memory. Smith studied ceramics at the Kansas City Art Institute before turning largely to painting and photography. His recent solo exhibitions include those mounted at the Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, NY (2024); Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (2024, 2021, 2019); Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2023); Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO (2022); Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha (2019); Luis de Jesus, Los Angeles (2018); and the Green Gallery, Milwaukee (2018). Recently, Smith’s work featured in Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, which debuted at the Frist Museum, Nashville (2023) and traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2024) and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2024). Smith’s work resides in numerous public collections, including the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Art Gallery of Ontario; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; and the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas, Austin.
