Emily Joyce, Then Where Sun When There

David B. Smith Gallery is proud to present Then Where Sun When There, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Emily Joyce.

In her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Joyce presents a new body of paintings that playfully synthesizes the languages of contemporary abstraction and mathematics. Reaching across centuries of human accomplishment to artists and thinkers who initially identified sacred geometric patterns and systems, inspiration for Joyce flips between the immediate and ancient. Artists such as Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca and American Modernist Georgia O’Keeffe lend their palate and soft-spoken spirituality to Joyce’s work, often leading to a humorous blend of logic and liveliness.

Treated as both articulation of the soul and basis of concrete logic, geometry’s universality transcends culture and time. In modern times this principal is often understood through complex systems, some invisible and some manifested as conspicuously as the grid of a city. These everyday patterns, frequently muddled by human design and burdened by stress, force a resilience of will. It is this will to move forward, the persistence of humanity to endure the systems imposed upon it and the systems it creates, that allows Joyce to tease the beauty out of infernal systems, exposing the hidden geometries that predate humanity and that will ultimately succeed it.