Apartment Therapy (#4), c. 2019

Gift of the artist

Estimate $8,000 - $10,000

Cauleen Smith’s mixed media artwork, “Apartment Therapy,” utilizes CB2 catalog pages, gouache, and rocks to create colorful habitats — environments where fantastical shapes and forms take the place of the expected human occupants. Smith says the drawings are “an attempt to contain a complex tension between defacement and desire.” They describe a kind of fetishistic machine in which the photographic image is brought to a higher level of sensuality through defilement, further heightened by its proximity to actual reference objects, which are placed like iconic physical-visual captions – a key of sorts – for the 2-D drawn image above it.