Star Smart is a mixed media and assemblage artist who has exhibited around the world in many countries across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. To date, she has participated in over 100 exhibitions including about two dozen museums and has won prestigious awards such as the Robert Rauschenberg Grant. Recent solo features include Worldwide Art Movement Gallery in Kochi, India and Elsa Victorios Gallery in Pembroke Pines, Florida and notable collective exhibitions include Miami Art Week, Yoko Ono’s Arising, and the Florence Biennale.
Describing her work as drawing upon “abstraction, minimalism, Dadaism, the concept of ikigai, anti-consumerism”, the viewer will note the alien and remote qualities of the art which seem organic yet unfamiliar. Using recycled material, Star Smart will blend waste paper and plastic into a slurry, converting them into a fiber textile-like substance. She cuts, molds, and torches her art into free-flowing forms and sometimes incorporates other materials, such as glass or cooled lava. Some of these artworks have an immolated quality to them as the viewer can note singes along some of the edges or even burn holes going through the art. These mixed media assemblages are made to either be as portable wall-hung art or as free-standing installations. Essentially, the works are abstractions based on the expressions of the process. The process being of taking recycled materials and distorting them into substances of fiber-like traits, from a familiar object or material into an unrecognizable and alien form. In following, the configurated materials are then assembled into constructs of distortion containing great angularity and curvature. As a result, the process dictates a metamorphosis, the material become dilapidated and deformed into unrecognizable substances is a reflection of personal experiences. From the ashes of destruction comes forth a phoenix which dominates the space, hence why the pieces are sometimes referred to as ‘immolations’.
In terms of material, Star Smart creates interdisciplinary practices which blur the lines between different artistic fields, making the works experimental in nature. Although the works can be described as mixed media or assemblages, they could also be classified as fiber art because she turns raw material into a paste which is molded into the form of textile-like substance. These compositions almost seem figurative, but not quite, more like a symbol of a figure to their organic shapes. The works are tormented or liberated based on your perspective as some of the forms contain limb-like extensions conveying shapes of grasping tentacles, indicating a sense of macabre and horror, while other areas resemble sensual curvature and uniformity. This dichotomy creates a variation of emotional impulses when investigating the art, which may leave the viewer puzzled or feeling confronted.
Shingles Side(1&2) contains an assemblage which appears like an installation designed to be hung on the wall. The various small pieces assembled together behave as a standard, symbols of identity carved by fire and shaped by immolation. Like as if she is trying to connect with her ancestors or a past life, the artist basks in creations of the primordial elements.
A deeply investigative artist, Star Smart can be described as an experimental creator who reinterprets the meaning of form. Her ability to take raw materials and turn them into unrecognizable substances and configurations reveals an aptitude for the art of the process. The artworks are creations of macabre machinations and crystalized splendor simultaneously. Through these fiber-like entities, either on the wall or in-the-round, an unfamiliar experience becomes based on angularity, curvature, distortion, and metamorphosis. Besides abstract, these works are symbolic of experiences, a reflective standard of creating new aesthetics based on the complexities of contemporary identity. Whether through bright, pastel colors resembling manufactured food to smooth muted colors and texture which resembles velvet to earthy tones molded by fire, the variations with their vivid alien distortions, create new visual experiences.