Elizabeth Paige Smith

unshade me of you

April 13 - May 24 2025

The Brick is pleased to present unshade me of you, a selection of work by Venice, California-based artist Elizabeth “Betsy” Paige Smith.  Between art and furniture design, Smith has a very fluid practice.  If anything, these distinct disciplines are subsumed by an approach to materials—resins, pigment, stone, clay, wood, molded plexiglass—that is unflinchingly direct. And while she is comfortable being referred to as artist and/or furniture designer, more often than not she describes what she does as simply “making things.”  These things cover a spectrum, from tables and chairs to objects that for lack of function, save being looked at, we designate sculpture. While the work in this exhibition–dating from 2017 to the present–touches on the range of what she does, it more importantly captures the spirit of a restless and resolute materialist.  

Smith has made things for as long as she can remember, though she credits her decision to become an artist to her family lineage, which includes her grandmother, the painter Beth Nablo, who was the first woman artist whose work was inducted into the collection of the Albright Knox museum in Buffalo, NY.  Born in Houston, at age eight, she and her family moved to the Cayman Islands where, as she describes, “everything was unfamiliar.” Yet, this new home offered her already active imagination new things around which to coalesce. She took solace in the beach where submergence in the ocean waters mirrored her sense of isolation. The toys her mother gave away when they left Houston were replaced by all manner of beach-combed flotsam and jetsam. Based largely on what was at hand, Smith’s childhood play then took on additional layers of creativity and improvisation.   

Smith found herself transplanted to a radically different place yet again when she left Cayman to attend a Catholic boarding high school in Atchison, Kansas. Feeling isolated, she instinctively turned to art, which became her “comfort zone.” School authorities made an exception specifically for her, allowing her to take art all four years of her attendance. Upon graduating, Smith went to the University of Kansas, Lawrence with friends to avoid being uprooted once again. She enrolled in a five-year program at the school of fine art, from 1988 to1993.  It was interdisciplinary, requiring that its students take courses in the applied and fine arts.  Alongside painting and drawing, Smith took courses in interior design, industrial design, and architecture. Notable faculty with whom she worked included the designer Viktor Papanek.  For her thesis project, Smith proposed an interior design schema for a hotel/casino. She undertook research at The Mirage in Las Vegas where she was taken under the wing of its senior interior designer who set her up with job connections in Los Angeles after she graduated in 1993.  

In Los Angeles, Smith worked as an assistant in major and well regarded interior design firms including Hirsch Bedner Associates; James Northcutt and Associates; and Wilson Associates, all of whose clients included international hotel chains.  In these offices, she noticed a stark gender divide with the women working in interior design, while the men worked in furniture design, to which she, as a maker, gravitated. By her mid twenties, in 1998, Smith developed her own furniture collection. She exhibited at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York to great acclaim, leading to a feature in the New York Times. Upon returning to Los Angeles, she resigned from Wilson Associates and landed a gig as an art director, designing sets and set pieces for music videos.  At the same time, she landed her first patrons.  In addition to making furniture, Smith was also thinking spatially, envisioning environments.  

In 1996 Smith, no stranger to surfing, moved to Venice where she befriended the legendary Dogtown skateboard crew. It was through Skip Engblom and Jeff Ho that she made the acquaintance of Scott Anderson, founder of Aqua Tech, a custom surfboard shop. Smith describes Anderson as a big brother whose shop was a haven for “Venice burnouts trying to stay clean and get back on their feet.” Anderson offered Smith a place to learn and experiment  with resins. It was there that she learned how to build in layers, gradually incorporating pigment into the pieces. She was a fixture at Aqua Tech throughout the early 2000’s coming to support herself through commissions and custom “focal pieces” rather than producing a manufactured line of furniture.  

Although making a living as a designer, Smith never lost sight of herself as an artist. Her work is not so much characterized as being either art or furniture as it purposefully and playfully falls between categories. The bright orange two-part, low cylindrical pedestals, or “orange mushrooms” as she calls them are a mix of functional and non-functional forms. Some can serve as stools or night stands, while the proportions of others make them too precarious for use. In either case, their vibrant yet sumptuous surfaces make them first and foremost objects of aesthetic appreciation. Another example includes five, multi-faceted chairs with abject,  resin-drenched surfaces through which one can discern writings from Smith’s teen diary and a nude female form rudely scrawled. Is this art in chair form, or a chair subject to expressionist excesses?

By and large, Smith’s work is hands-on and highly tactile. Even as a colorist, her approach to the subject is as pure substance. For all their seamless production values, the enclosed triangular plexiglass pieces are simply vehicles for color in its most tactile form.  When the pigment is put into the enclosure and it is sealed and shaken, what you see is what you get.  What appears to be gestural abstraction is a product of the chance clumping of pigment or its collection in areas of electrostatic streaking, which varies from pigment to pigment.  

unshade me of you uses the entirety of The Brick’s premises, including the back courtyard area, which features three works from Smith’s Girls series (2017) or “stone girls” as she calls them. Inventively assembled from rough hewn chunks and columns of basalt, these large female forms beg to be read as a response addressed to none other than Stonehenge. The stone girls, however, throw Smith’s work into stark relief when it comes to questions of the creative impulse and its origins. The stone figures would have us locate them in monumental, prehistoric gestures affirming human kind’s existence. 

And then there is the sampling of Smith’s small terra cotta forms included in the exhibition, a counterpoint to the larger-than-life reclining “girls.” These delightfully crude, pinched forms recall Freud’s reading of the child’s first creative act. Whatever the origin, Smith wants to make things in an unfettered fashion, regardless of disciplinary boundaries. Towards that end, during her opening–at 4 p.m. on Sunday, April 13–Smith will perform live accompaniment to a sound piece she has developed over the past three years. 

Support is provided by Teiger Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

Elizabeth Paige Smith, Reality is not two, bronze patina on foam, 2025