The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

WAITSBURG-Adorning Art X Agent's walls for November and December, is Sparkling & Broken.

This two-person exhibition, featuring artists Rachel Smith and Juventino Aranda, was celebrated in an opening Saturday, Nov 3.

There, the artists were on hand to share insights on their experience and process in creating the visual imagery on display.

Sparkling & Broken is the continuation of a conversation the artist duo has initiated in previous shows. In their 2018 Studio Articolore show, Comfort Zones, each artist explored how we, as people, interact with discomfort.

Building upon that discomfort, Smith's maps, studies on post civil war reconstruction, are juxtaposed against her more aesthetic work, Benign Inequality.

For Smith, her process is as intuitive as it is intentionally challenging.

"There's always something in the work that is a little bit disquieting," says Smith, "even if you don't want to totally see it, there's a little underlying discomfort."

In Benign Inequality, inside a wooden frame, set apart from each other, are four quadrants of fabric that isn't fabric.

To create it, Smith undertook personal challenges to work in a larger format, and to experiment with using tools that are usually associated in her practice with commercial art in new, fine art, ways.

Through her work Smith expresses the labor of making. "I'm always trying to figure out a way to make it relevant to now, but also personal," says Smith.

By long stitch embroidering lines rather than drawing them, Smith performs the creation, and whether it be intuitive or intentional, the resulting inconsistencies-or lack thereof-are where historical and personal meet, quite literally stitched in time.

"...Something about doing these tiny stitches over and over," shares Smith, "it kind of makes it meditative and you can slow down and think about it."

Historically, fabric, sewing and embroidering are all considered feminine.

Smith is interested in systems and how people, once associated with certain work, can be marginalized based on what they do.

"If you can associate a certain work to a certain person, you can reduce the humanity of them or the importance of what they do. I've pretty much stopped drawing or painting with traditional materials and I've started using sewing to elevate the status of the material," explains Smith, "If you can elevate the status of a material, you might be able to elevate the status of a population of people at the same time."

Smith teaches graphic design at Columbia Basin College and also owns a tshirt company.

"[Benign Inequality] also plays into the idea that I print these shirts that are made by whomever in China, Indonesia, wherever the shirts are coming from...this may be a kind of dialogue with people I don't know but I interact with the thing that they make that I buy and then sell to somebody else. Some of it might be contemplations around that that I haven't fully fleshed out." For Smith, art is as much a declaration as an exploration.

Juventino Aranda's work has a different approach. Having links to Mexican American culture and growing up Chicano in the States, Aranda's viewpoint is unique.

His pieces in the show mirror that sense of fabric in Smith's work and allude to meticulous planning and high production value just because of the materials.

Aranda's piece, Carry Yourself with the Confidence of Mediocre White Man (Mar-a-Lago), is made from bronze and etched mirrored glass that is carefully ensconced in a corrugated cardboard frame.

Both artists are interested in how the personal and political aspects of life are often stirred up together.

Through Sparkling & Broken, the two contextualize a manner of being for ourselves and for others.

Art X Agent is open Saturdays 12-6 p.m. or by appointment. Sparkling & Broken will be on display through 2019.