Siana Smith lives and works in Bay Area, Northern California. She has an MFA from California College of the Arts.
Artist Statement
The development of my artwork has been shaped by my upbringing in China during the material-scarce and emotionally oppressed post-Cultural Revolution Era and subsequent emersion in American consumer culture. Through my paintings, I seek to reflect and explore personal feelings, attachments, and illusions associated with material processions. I also investigate significant societal and cultural factors that profoundly impact and shape an individual's thoughts and behaviors.
I employ large-scale composition, vibrant colors, and intricate details to depict consumer spectacles, discarded tissues, and individuals within their environment. By using symbols of transience, push and pull, and other elements, I aim to encourage the viewers to consider the more profound, often darker social and psychological context surrounding objects of beauty.
The essence of what truly matters lies in the distance between what is seen and what remains unseen. My artwork strives to challenge societal spectacles and explores the complexities of human emotions, experience, and relationships with oneself and the environment.
Interview with Lauren Sorresso (MFA candidate at CCA)
Siana Smith is a painter who explores the paradoxes in her life and the world around her. She is interested in conflicting emotional forces, believing that "the duality of things exists everywhere." Her work includes a range of self-representative subjects: portraits of herself or loved ones, and paintings of personal objects or objects she identifies with. The works express hidden meaning, embodying the "invisible strings" of emotional relationships, and exposing aspirational symbols.
Smith's portraits juxtapose classic techniques with contemporary themes. Inspired by masterpieces of photorealism and the sublime, she works primarily with oil on canvas, in an approach that integratestechnical and spiritual perspectives. When she has an urge to paint someone, she photographs her subject,taking dozens of pictures until she has one that reveals an internal aspect of their personality. Then she formulates the composition and pairs it with a concept. In that layered combination, she identifies a hiddenpart of the person, bringing the interior out and rendering it with great precision.
Her commodity paintings communicate the complicated emotions attached to objects of consumerism.She paints luxury goods that she owns - a stack of handbags, pearls and scarves and perfume in a pile, bands of glossy patent leather belts, diamond and gem encrusted rings worn layered together on a middle finger, a pointed tube of fresh red lipstick, with sharp detail, in vivid almost-garish colors that evoke magazine ad photos. They're assertive, both alluring and warning. They depict the contradictory desires she associates with themand challenge the self-image they represent. Though the sheen of these semi-sacred items looms large in the imagination, they just collect dust at home. Or as she says, "Every coin has two sides."
The other objects she paints - a box of tissues with aluminum foil, a spiraling stairwell marked with cautiontreads, and an empty mooring on a pier, for example, convey her projected feelings.
Recent works include Pink Backpack - a portrait of her daughter that highlights the stress of pandemic and political struggles, Lure of the Skin and Weapon - two large-scale paintings from the commodity series that were exhibited in the deYoung Open, and Battle - a portrait of her son and reflection on the longing for attention as relationships change.