Now | Contemporary 2022

JURIED BY TIFFANY WOLF SMITH

MARCH 4–26, 2022

​PRESS RELEASE

Art Room presents its annual juried exhibition Now | Contemporary 2022 at Arts Fort Worth, which features a compelling group of artworks in a variety of media. The exhibition showcases work by Paul Armstrong, Lane   Banks, Kimberlea Bass, Carol Benson, Michael Burns, Randall Day, Hector Del Campo, Mckee Frazior, Sara Ishii, Katie McKay Jones, Carlos Ocando, Raul Rodriguez, Abbie Stellar, Kathleen Thum, Amye Wake, and Matthew Wood. The show runs from March 4 through 26, 2022.

Now | Contemporary 2022 was juried by Tiffany Wolf Smith, who is an artist and educator based out of Fort Worth, TX. The daughter of humanitarian workers in South East Asia, Tiffany is searching for new ideas of home and place. She took an early interest in interior design before finding it limiting and switching to a career in the arts. Interiors and design still influence her work. She loves the comedic and absurd. Tiffany was a founding member of the artist collective HOMECOMING! COMMITTEE and a former member of the Dallas artist-run coop 500X. Tiffany has served as the Assistant Curator of Education for studio programs at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth for 10 years. Tiffany received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Texas Christian University and a Master of Fine Arts from Southern Methodist University.

In regard to her selections for the exhibition, Smith writes, “I was overwhelmed, in the best possible sense of overwhelmed, by the amount and caliber of the submitted works. There were multiple strong threads of connection between so many. I could have juried four or five exhibitions from this impressive pool of works! The evidence is clear, our arts community is definitely thriving.  

“Now | Contemporary 2022 features a strong dialogue that emerged between 23 works: Hardlines. These artists made compositional decisions that move from hard edges to meandering lines to physical truncations of the picture plane. There are sculptural works that purport a stiffness on first look but the hardlines soften in their materiality. There are photography works that have been so carefully composed of the hardlines within the camera's visual range, the pictures become almost abstracted as the focus shifts to the formal aesthetics of the composition and away from the content of the image. And lastly, paintings and drawings, where the hardlines within the frame construct beautiful and surprising spatial tensions and surfaces.”

Arts Fort Worth is open to the public and will host an opening reception on March 4, 2022, from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm. The exhibition will also be on view during Fort Worth Art Dealers Association’s Spring Gallery Night on March 26, 2022.