april april is pleased to present Foxing, a solo exhibition by Bronson Smillie. This is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery and his first in Pittsburgh.

Paper exposed to fungal growth or oxidation over time develops spots like skin after summers of sun; rusty freckles bloom from the fibers as a sign of age and deterioration. To be foxed. Localized and not prone to contagion, the blemishing is harmless, merely denoting the inevitable: use, time, and conditional promiscuity. Foxing is liberated functionality.

Bronson Smillie’s practice begins at the cultural blight that most things of the recent past experience. His substrates for drawing are inherited from auction and online marketplaces—perfectly empty midcentury ledgers and notepads, upturned industrial shelves, and paper guillotines. Rather than preserving the historical integrity of each, Smillie levels distinctions between eras and categories, allowing the anachronous to participate equally within a new speculative grammar. History transitions from chronological to compositional.

Foxing is camp in its combined aesthetic plumage and melancholic ambivalence. Challenging conservation principles, the work is queer in its lack of concern for a logical end, like friends Venmoing each other the same twenty dollars back and forth until one of them dies. In “Queering Waste through Camp,” Guy Schaffer writes that “moralism regarding waste often fails precisely at the cusp of visibility.” Camp, by contrast, exposes what waste the world is made of by calling it “beautiful, vibrant, and personal (even when it is simultaneously dangerous, disgusting, or industrial).” Such are the bar rags and buttons that adorn pulverized newspapers and postage stamps in Smillie’s Debris Flows. In this way, usefulness was never the point.

The vintage and content of 1970s prefab architectural drawings from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin engage with Smillie’s gesture in Plan A and Plan B, twin speculative drawings wherein the artist is not paper’s savior but forces our perception through a veil of dancing folk sigils. Windows as a structuring device for vision, decoration, and telling time instruct the exhibition’s centerpieces: Felt Drawing With a View I and II — a pair of seven-part drawings cordoned off by panes within the framed structure of a traditional Georgian sash window. Here Smillie nods toward the gallery’s own transom bays, dotted by a few colored and textured panes of glass. These squares were installed by the building’s former owner, a glassworker and artist herself. This history doesn’t matter until the late afternoon light rakes the room with an atonal chorus of color and shape.

april april

On view