Ki Smith Gallery is pleased to announce Points of Distraction, a two-part exhibition of new sculptural paintings by Charlie Hudson, and featuring fellow artists Luke Ivy Price and Caslon Bevington as curatorial advisors. 

The exhibition begins with the first two week installation, opening March 31st. It highlights a suite of works inspired by Hudson's walks through New York City over the past year. In each piece, Hudson crafts geometric wood forms that mimic the lines of, say, a Williamsburg stoplight at 4:00 am, or the glare of the setting sun refracting off the glossy skyscrapers of Midtown. Impressionistic brushstrokes of acrylic and oil add new depths of field, creating abstracted tableaus of urban life — both remembered and imagined. Hudson's exploration of the cityscape culminates in the second installation, opening April 16th, where these disparate and distorted scenes are rearranged and mosaicked into an immersive, panoramic view of a single street corner.

Hudson’s studio pulsates with music from different eras as he paints, and he takes inspiration from the surrounding art books, their pages opened to Louise Nevelson’s wooden wall pieces, Monet’s garden portraits, and the incandescent dot painting of Aboriginal Australian artist Yannima Tommy Watson. These images and sounds seep into his textured depictions of the city, each work emerging as an energetic amalgam as diverse as New York City itself. 

Hudson describes this installation as an invitation to physically step inside the color-filled world he has long portrayed in his two dimensional paintings and murals, cheekily referencing when characters of the beloved late-90’s kids show Blue's Clues lept into pictures on their walls, exclaiming, “Blue-skidoo, we can too!” When exploring Points of Distraction, the individual works begin to melt together, transforming the gallery into a surreal stage in which the viewer becomes the star performer. The intentional lack of people in the work facilitates this transformation. Like a good host, Hudson’s work allows its guests to shine and doesn’t hog the conversation with didactic theories or narratives.

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