Time Isn't After Us

The series of hand embellished textile works, Time Isn’t After Us, was created for a solo exhibition of the same title at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn NY, March 23-May 12, 2024, curated by gallery Co-Founder/Co-Director, Clare Britt. Listed as a "Must See" exhibition in ArtForum April 2024. Click on the individual works to view more. Shelley Smith is a contemporary Southern artist and curator based in her home state of North Carolina. Works on cloth serve as the foundation of her practice, which overlaps contemporary digital technologies with ancient techniques of hand embroidery and fabric manipulation to produce otherworldly compositions from otherwise mundane, overlooked moments found in the natural world. These works are a reflection on cycles of death, decay, preservation, and a future both created and lost. Every living being deserves to be held by the earth, as we dissolve into ourselves, and breathe life into the next. The time-weathered wood and bone is captured and manipulated into glimpses of far away places, or spaces within us, perhaps someone’s memory, or a moment that has not yet arrived. It’s all happening now, beginning and ending at the same time, all the time.