Statement

Carmen Smith’s practice is rooted in the concept of place. Influenced by her academic background in architectural design and her personal experience of living in dozens of cities, Smith is interested in the ways environments choreograph human experience. Her compositions move between the observable and conceptual layers embedded within the built environment. Through exaggerating, isolating, layering, fragmenting, and fracturing, she investigates how place is not fixed or stable, but is continually produced. 

Recent work focuses on recreational architecture and coastal landscapes, where architectures of leisure and luxury intersect with ecological uncertainty. Pools, slides, homes, and urban infrastructures become sites where human desires for order, pleasure, and permanence encounter forces of change, erosion, and transformation. Rather than depicting place as fixed or stable, Smith's work presents it as an ongoing negotiation between perception, memory, environmental forces, and the structures through which we move. 

Bio

Carmen Smith (b. 1977) in Jacksonville, Florida lives and works in Hollywood, Florida. Smith received a B.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond, VA, where she was awarded the Academic and Creative Excellence Award (2005). Smith is currently a M.F.A. Painting Candidate at Savannah College of Art and Design. Smith is known for her brightly colored paintings of South Florida architectural imagery. Selected Solo exhibitions include “Night Swimming," 2021, at Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, Virginia; “Rushing Down,” 2022, at Coral Springs Museum of Art in Coral Springs, Florida; and “Color Pools,” 2024, at Imago Por Las Artes in South Miami, Florida. Selected group exhibitions include the 8th Annual All-Media Juried Biennial, 2017, Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Hollywood, Florida; Frank Contemporaries, 2022, The Frank C. Ortis Gallery, Pembroke Pines Florida; and BFA Broward's Art & Somm, Mad Arts Museum, 2025, Hollywood, Florida. Smith was a recipient of the Broward Cultural Division Individual Artist Grant, 2024. Her work is in the permanent collection of RSM US headquarters at the Main in Las Olas in Ft. Lauderdale as well as many private collectors in the US and Colombia. She is a member of the Bakehouse Art Complex and the SOBRA Collective.