September 2023 to December 2023

University of Waterloo Art Gallery, Waterloo, Ontario 

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From Ivan Jurakic, Curator of UWAG: “Shelter II is a large-scale beaded sculpture that ambitiously expands on the artist’s beadwork practice. Applying weaving techniques employed in glass bead-stitching on a completely different scale, over the last two years Smith has radically up-scaled her process to incorporate hundreds of grapefruit-sized metal beads tensioned together using steel cable. The end result is a gargantuan beadwork that has immense physical presence and a surface that slyly reflects and distorts its surroundings. While building on the artist’s training in architecture, Shelter II is also a pointed rebuke to the dismissal of beading as ‘women’s work’ within the context of a patriarchal Western art history rather than as a viable and transgressive art form in its own right.”