Jill Smith is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Ontario (1995). Her most recent work explores everyday absurdity, as well as the connective possibilities of materiality. By re-contextualizing familiar motifs with organic, bodily forms, her work calls into question how one both exists and performs as a social body. While Smith’s work stimulates the imagination through whimsical and nonsensical colour and form, it is the relatable, yet ambiguous materiality that offers a platform to question the familiar, and escape to the alien and the uncanny.

As a participant in Luminous Bodies, I intend to expand my knowledge and methodology of how the body can be represented. Throughout this residency, I will be exploring the opposing, but often simultaneous feelings of connection to and alienation by one’s body. I plan to primarily work with paper and pulp, materials that are both delicate and durable, to develop a range of sculptures, taking into consideration the fragility and strength of the body and mind. With interest in the maker-object relationship, I will be forming material bodies and combining them with additional materials as a gesture of embellishing, mending, and healing. I look forward to this residency and learning how I can expand my visual language in order to challenge myself as an artist and create work that questions (material) bodies.

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Jill Smith holds a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honors Specialization in Studio Art) from Western University in London, Ontario. Her work includes printmaking, ceramics, photography, and painting, relying heavily on experimentation and process. Smith has exhibited her work in galleries across Ontario, such as the Artlab Gallery, Forest City Gallery, The Arts Project, Open Studio, Earl Selkirk Gallery at ARTiculations, and Daniels Spectrum, as well as Friends and Neighbours Gallery in Montreal, Quebec. Smith will be performing in the upcoming exhibition, in attendance(Forest City Gallery).

Alongside her practice, Smith has worked in the art community in various roles. She was Intern for Caviar20, an independent art dealer in Toronto (2014), as well as for Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography in Toronto (2015). She worked as Intern for Artlab Gallery in London (2016). Smith curated Nuit Violette (2015-2016), a night art exhibition at Western University, and has recently held the position of Intern at Forest City Gallery. Smith has participated in artist residency programs at Sparkbox Studio in Picton, ON (May 2017) and at AGA LAB in Amsterdam, NL (September 2017). She is currently a member of the AGO Youth Council and Akin Collective.