Linda Smith is the Cat’s Meow at bG Gallery

With Power and Pattern now at bG Gallery, Linda Smith has created a lively, joyous and vibrant exhibition that’s as much fun as it is beautiful art.  As a major feline fancier, the pieces I was most drawn to were her alive, witty, fairy-tale-like cats.

Color and texture are the big takeaways from this well-curated show, which serves as a retrospective of sorts, moving seamlessly from acrylic on canvas works created in the 1980s in brilliant oranges and reds, intercut with ribbons of perriwinkle blue, to her massive high-fire ceramic cat totems from 2022.

In all of her works, whether small figures of humans, women’s faces, those delightful cats, yellow dogs – whatever the image may be – along with their inherent sense of joy and celebration, there is a sense of the totemic, as if these figures reprsented something truly powerful in the real world.

Indeed, the best of all art is a totem of sorts, a way to show our humanness, ward off evil, offer up beauty to the gods of light with which to sanctify our souls. Smith’s work embodies these magical, fantastical qualities while presenting images that are deeply grounded in the beautifully mundane images of life, the things that we do and experience as humans.

This sense of the experiential, warm and welcoming, yet mythologizing the recognizable, is present in all Smith’s work here. It is in the quilt-like pattern surrounding the titular “Mother & Child” acrylic work (at the top of which the letters “Mom” seem to shape a mountain peak pattern in pink). It is palpable in her “Small Cat Totem” shaped in four pieces, a cat head topping a work that includes two other images of cats painted on separate cast pieces of the totem; as well as in Smith’s wonderful mosaic “Woman, Cat & Dog.”

Color of course is key to Simth’s work as well, in the dazzling turquoise of her tattooed “Woman with Turquoise Shirt”  scuplture, and in the many hued human, bird, adn dog faces intersepersed with big blue polka-dot like patterns on her “Totem #5.”

Each work also seems to contain a sense of homage to the spirits of animals (including the human animal.) This is due in part to the massive size of the some of the totem ceramic works, “Totem #5″ for example is 72 x 16 x 16, the ceramic stacked carefully over steel rod and base.  Smith’s art is reverential in a way, that reverence illuminated with a sense of whimsy and wonder, of the magic of life itself, the colors that shadows can cast on many hued faces, on the furs of our feline and canine companions, in the harsh but vivid red, black, and white of her diminuitive but powerful 6 x 6” “Political Paintings” series.

Charming, beguiling, but also intense, Smith’s art commands attention, requires an awe-fused respect, and most of all, above all, engages the senses with the wonder and spirit of play. That’s the true power in her many-hued patterns.

Commandingly exhibited with her totem work in the foreground of the gallery, Smith’s exhibit lights up the bG space with a delighted passion in her subjects, and for her viewers.

Be empowered yourself. The exhibition is at bG through November 14th. The gallery is located at 2525 Michigan Ave. Space #A2 in Bergamot Station, and is open Tuesday through Saturday.

• Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis