We head to St Louis this week for a look at Fifteen Windows Gallery’s new solo show with Codak Smith, the graffiti artist, painter, designer and tattoo artist who has prepared Stitch Incoming for the summer showing. Working out of Chicago's Sunflower Tattoo, Smith is one third of Burnrfon, a collective stitched together by shared obsession. Painter, muralist, tattooist, wanderer of mediums — Codak doesn't choose a single surface to believe in. He lets the line decide: sometimes a wall, sometimes a body, sometimes just the quiet architecture of memory, redrawn.
But for this body of work, Smith is turning to another medium; printmaking, utilizing monoprint, lithography, and linocut and incorporates what the gallery notes are “fractured forms, broken-glass imagery, and layered textures that evoke a life shattered into pieces.”
What Smith does do is show that mark-making is a living thing: ambiguous, emotional, restless, and builds an architecture for which these can be visually created.
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