Jacob Jackmauh, Caitlin McCann & Benjamin Stallings
As for me, I’m just passing through this planet
March 8 - March 31, 2024


Irina Jasnowski Pascual
Wipers
September 15 - October 29, 2023



Coco Klockner
honesty
July 8 - August 6, 2023


Morgan Canavan, Ben Estes, Marisa Takal
More Coming Back & More Returning
May 5 - June 11, 2023


Sylvie Hayes-Wallace
Center of the Universe
August 5 - September 18, 2022


Amanda Horowitz

Bad Water, True West or Between Myself the Crickets and the Coyote
performed by Sophia Cleary and Ada Friedman
July 14 & July 15, 2022


Suzanna Zak
Coming Home to the Ice Age
opening May 13 - June 24, 2022 


Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, Milano Chow, Jenni Crain,
Kristin Dickson- Okuda, Rubens Ghenov, Ann Gillen, KB Jones,
Michael Kennedy Costa, Sean Macalister, Sarah McMenimen,
J. Parker Valentine, Anna Rosen
XX Perfect Souls, curated by Natalie Smith
April 1 - May 6, 2022


Justin Chance, Cameron Cameron, Tristan Higginbotham
Serendipity Trail
February 12 - March 25, 2022


Noah Furman
Beginners
December 3, 2021 - January 25, 2022


Angélique Heidler
Piselli
October 8 - November 19, 2021

Natalie Smith
Nothing Within or Without
August 13 - September 14, 2021


Celia Lesh & Esther Sibiude
A Hole Filled With Noise, curated by Colleen Billing
July 2 - August 2, 2021

E. Saffronia Downing
Field Dug Over
May 21- June  27, 2021


Matt Smoak
Body Without Organs
April 2 - May 2, 2021

Eleanor Conover
Learning From the Steep Slope
March 5 - March 30, 2021




About
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open by appointment

located beside
320 E. Churchwell Ave
Knoxville, Tennessee





Body Without Organs, Installation View
Body Without Organs, Installation View
Body Without Organs, Installation View
Bricolage Garment, 2021, cotton shirts, sandwich wrapper, photos, paint, paper

Mirror #2, 2021, oil on board
Bricolage Garment, 2021, wood, paper


Mirror #2, 2021, oil on board
Bricolage Garment, 2021, yukata, shirt, alumnium
Mirror #5, 2021, oil on board
Mirror #1, 2021, oil on board
Bricolage Garment, 2021, cotton shirt, quilt scraps, aluminum, paint
Bricolage Garment, 2021, cotton yukata, cotton shirt, wood

Mirror #1, 2021, oil on board

Bricolage Garment, 2021, wool  coat, cotton yukata, ink on  paper, magazine page, photos
Bricolage Garment, 2020, cotton yukata, cotton shirt, wood




My eyes want,
my sphincter wants,
my lungs want,
my heart wants,
I become the nature of their collective desire.  

I spend the afternoons making drawings. Sumi ink on sandwich wrappers. A likeness born from my mind’s eye has moved my hand. I take apart clothing and furniture. A mirror of interiority. The construction of a possible body using the scraps and fragments from the items around my home.

The light is warm, yellow.
The disorganized body.
The assembled body.
How do I make myself a body without organs?
                                                                                                                                                                                                -Matt Smoak, 2021


Today Matt texted me about art unfolding beyond the shadows of institutional ways of thinking, of consuming. Several weeks ago talking on the phone, he says to me something about poetry under the shadow of capitalism. This ethos is woven in to the work in Body Without Organs. It resides somewhere other than the world of surface and appearances. The material, familiar— cotton shirts, sandwich wrappers, thrift store tags, polaroid photographs—  but in their reassembly move towards a vast reservoir of becoming. I’m reluctant to say they hold secrets as nothing is intentionally kept hidden, the work just always has the capacity for further unfolding.

More draped over a hanger than properly hung. Stretcher bars dangle from a hole in a shoulder, drawings rest in the crook of an armpit, a reflection is seen in paintings of mirrors and in shining compressed pie tins, poetry tumbles out of every sleeve. I wrote a note in my journal in between these two times speaking with Matt about the shadow of the earth itself. Cast through its atmosphere and into outer space, the shadows visible fringe appearing in the early dusk and late dawn. I wrote this thinking about watching the sun rise and set not only to see the sun, but to be a witness to the earth seeing itself.



Matt Smoak is an artist based in Connecticut. He was raised in Tokyo and Washington, DC, and is currently a Painting MFA candidate at the Yale School of Art. His work has been shown in solo shows in Europe and the US. He participated in the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine in 2019.