Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present If for Once We Could Do Nothing, an online exhibition of paintings by Carrie Mae Smith. Taking its title and sensibility from Pablo Neruda’s poem “Keeping Quiet,” the exhibition considers what it means to be still in a time of noise—to listen, to look, and to remember the quiet labor of care.
In this body of work, Smith continues her engagement with still life painting as both a meditative and a subversive practice. Her compositions—tablecloths draped and folded, freshly picked peas in a basket, peaches glowing against a patterned cloth—speak softly but insistently. They are not nostalgic recreations of domesticity, but careful reanimations of the simplicity of nourishment and ritual. “Perhaps the earth can teach us,” Neruda writes, “as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive.” Smith’s paintings follow that instruction, seeking vitality in stillness and meaning in the everyday.