Painted in 2015, Emily Mae Smith’s Waiting Room is a hypnotic example of the artist’s sleek and highly imaginative visual language that combines symbolism, surrealism, and pop art. Through this lexicon, Smith addresses themes of scopophilic desire and consumption, tinting the results with a subtle feminist agenda. Merging two of the artist’s signature themes of the figure of the broom and round eyeglasses, the present work portrays an anthropomorphized broom, whose bristles have transformed into shimmering, glamorous hair, wearing sunglasses reflecting numberless clockfaces. Included in the monographic exhibition Medusa at Laurel Gitlen, New York, in 2015, the work subsequently featured in the groundbreaking show Unrealism curated by Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian for Art Basel Miami in the historic Moore Building. 

 

"A broom is a tool, but it’s also this visual tool that communicates stories and ideas in my paintings. This agent, like some kind of secret agent, going through the history of art, disturbing constructs, making some trouble, or behaving badly, but is never doing the work of the broom. The broom is never sweeping!"
—Emily Mae Smith

Smith’s broom-like figure, a recurring avatar in her oeuvre, exists within a polyvalent painterly realm evocative of the work of René Magritte. The artist explained on the origin of her character, “It initially came while I was re-watching Disney’s Fantasia, specifically that sequence when the broom is bewitched by the sorcerer's apprentice. It was just performing the labor, completely unappreciated for doing all the hard work in making the sorcerer’s castle function. I so deeply identified, not only as a female but just as a working class person....When the broom got free, it started to do interesting things. Sometimes it looks more like a mop, sometimes it looks more like a paintbrush; and attributes of the broom become visible in other objects.”ⁱ By personifying a domestic object, Smith tackles the issues of female objectification and sexuality in a literal sense, while theoretically conveying the complexities of gendered social norms. She further elucidated, “It was a way for me to paint an object, figure, female and phallus at the same time. I thought it was funny and an ideal vehicle.”ⁱⁱ

 

“Context is like a frame, and I want to render frames visible, acknowledging limitations, point of view, and correcting the assumed frames of the past.”
– Emily Mae Smith

Another critical motif for Smith, the glasses “serve as reflective lenses into [her] paintings, suggesting both the insatiable desire to look and the horror of looking.”ⁱⁱⁱ From glasses to curtains, the artist frequently utilizes framing devices in her work to address human subjectivity and the important role of context—specifically, time. The present work directly addresses this notion while demonstrating Smith’s propensity to insert visual puns within her compositions by dually depicting the glasses as timeless clocks.

 

Astutely materializing the present work’s titular allusion to the idea of waiting, the visual quip of the clock-face eyewear is, as Barry Schwabsky claims, “Smith’s brilliantly disquieting invention for Waiting Room.”^iv The reference to time goes beyond gender commentary, encompassing broader notions related to the human condition and mortality, a subject the artist has explored in her series entitled The Studio. The present work’s setting of a waiting room—suggested by the gradating yellow-to-purple background that resembles closed Venetian blinds—showcases Smith’s presentation of the concept of waiting in a layered manner, melding the mundane with the existential.

 

In the Artist’s Words

 

On the occasion of her 2018-2019 solo exhibition at Le Consortium Museum in Dijon, Emily Mae Smith discussed the themes that dominate her painterly practice.
 

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Currently the subject of significant commercial and institutional attention, Smith has received important solo exhibitions around the globe, including at the Le Consortium, Dijon in 2018, Perrotin Gallery, Tokyo in 2019, the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah in 2020, and Rodolphe Janssen Gallery, Brussels, in 2021.

 

• Just this month in Hong Kong, Phillips set the artist’s world record with Broom Life, which achieved $1,591,515 (HK$12,350,000), soaring over 20 times the work’s high estimate.

 

ⁱ Emily Mae Smith, quoted in ‘Emily Mae Smith: A Clean Sweep’, JUXTAPOZ Magazine, May 6, 2019, online.
ⁱⁱ Emily Mae Smith, quoted in Charlotte Jansen, “Emily Mae Smith,” Elephant Magazine, issue no. 26, Spring 2016, p. 66.
ⁱⁱⁱ Medusa, Laurel Gitlen, New York, press release, September 2015.
^iv Barry Schwabsky, “Emily Mae Smith: Laurel Gitlen,” Artforum, December 2015, online.