A Day Above Ground is a Good One

Kapp Kapp is pleased to present A Day Above Ground is a Good One, a new series of paintings by American artist Lucien Smith. This exhibition marks Smith’s debut solo show with the gallery and is part of his ongoing thumbnails series, featuring smaller-scale works created using a robotic airbrush.

In A Day Above Ground is a Good One, Smith examines the voyeuristic nature of the internet through video stills of B.K.S. Iyengar, which he encountered during his research into yoga and meditation. The exhibition critiques how Iyengar is presented in a way that feels tokenized, almost as though he is an animal on display. By translating these distorted images through the robotic airbrush system, Smith creates a detached, mechanical rendering that mirrors the coldness of experiencing the world through a screen. These works question how technology transforms and mediates our experience of the world, and what is lost or altered in the process.

Smith recalls in particular Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 series, which documents the deaths of members of the Red Army Faction. In that series, Richter explores the uneasy space between historical documentation and subjective memory, using the blur to question the reliability of visual information and how we construct and reconstruct the past. Similarly, Smith's work interrogates how technology distorts the way we experience and remember the world, transforming familiar imagery into something both distant and abstract.

Each of the ten paintings captures a moment from Iyengar’s practice, frozen and reinterpreted by the robotic airbrush. Although grounded in specific moments, these works transcend their origins, inviting viewers to reflect on how technology distorts our interaction with memory and experience.

A Day Above Ground is a Good One will be on view through January 11, 2025.

Lucien Smith (b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in New York City and Montauk, NY. Smith earned his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2011. Recent exhibitions include People are Strange, Will Shott Gallery, New York, NY; The Burden of Dreams, Kapp Kapp, NY (offsite presentation at FOOD); Incidentals: A Brief Survey 2011-2012; and Southamption Suite, The Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY. In late 2024, Smith will also be opening FOOD, an artist-run restaurant on Canal St, reimagining the 1970s restaurant famously owned and run by Gordon Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden, and Tina Girouard. The restaurant will be an ongoing collaboration with the Matta-Clark estate.