Frances Smokowski at Cavin-Morris Gallery

In Dialogue

Installation view, Cavin-Morris Gallery, photo courtesy the artist

In 2017, during post-concussion recovery and before considering any public audience, Frances Smokowski began drawing as part of her wellness routines. She knew even then that the work could one day be useful and inspiring to others, and she never felt it existed only for her. Pandemic-era synchronicities later led to gallery representation, confirming that this is the moment for her bio-glyphics and energy-scapes to come forward.

Cavin-Morris Gallery first presented Smokowski’s biomorphic abstraction in the 2023 group exhibition EDGEWALKERS. The work was well received, and gallerist Shari Cavin proposed a solo show of Efficacies. Preparing dozens of framed works required distinct phases with long periods of waiting, such as for sample corners to be milled. With tasks like inscriptions, photography, and mounting multiplied thirty times, Smokowski maintained her daily drawing routine.

How did this exhibition come together, and what made you decide to show Efficacies and Aetherscapes?

When I brought Shari Cavin the moulding samples for her input, I also spoke with her about a new series in graphite, on slightly larger paper, surprising her with the first three. Over a year later, in January 2025, I brought in one framed Efficacy drawing, and a portfolio of 24 Aetherscapes. After contemplating the drawings awhile, Shari offered her impression that the Efficacies were like samples, specimens or isolated denizens of the “worlds” or spaces the Aetherscapes illuminate.

She then asked if they could be presented along with the 30 drawings from 2017. I saw the potential in my mind’s eye, immediately agreed, and began thinking about logistics. Both series combined brought the total number of drawings for the show to 54. I left the gallery pondering how vastness and specificity suddenly took on a whole new dimension within our new exhibition plan.

Both Efficacies and Aetherscapes explore forms that feel both microscopic and cosmic. How do you see the connection between these two scales in your drawings?

Patterns across scale are fascinating to me, informing and eluding, but also enhancing what it means to be alive in the perceivable here-and-now. Microscopic and cosmic extremes bracket my biomorphic abstractions, serving as referents, bumpers, space activators that guide pictorial encounters. Since I work without a vision of the completed composition, it is the adventure of drawing out something never-before-seen that motivates me. The minuscule and the unfathomably vast are both invisible realms that simultaneously hold palpable truths and great mysteries, excellent things to meditate upon. To draw out something new by feel requires centering, looking both within and beyond personal experience.

I’m a vacillator, aware I am living between and within imperceptible extremes while appreciating the very fact of manifest form having scale, scope, power of presence. It works best when I don’t think about imagery, or anything at all, and just allow engagement with the all-encompassing creative force, and the materials at hand, to happen. Minutia matters as much as expanse in the realm of relativity.

Exhibition announcement, courtesy the artist

Allan Graubard describes your Aetherscapes as shaped by “automatism, entrancements, accidents, reciprocations.” How much of your process is planned, and how much happens intuitively as you work?

There is close to zero planned in the biomorphic works under discussion here, except for the series-defining decisions like pencil brand or grade, paper type and format dimensions. For example, The Aetherscapes involved a switch from my favorite Faber Castell pencils to micro point graphite lead in mechanical pencil holders. So those vast expanses characteristic of the series were created with the tiniest point of contact.

The result of this decision was a very slow building of layered darks which paid off in landing greater depth in forms and space. Standardization of material choices across a series is another way I free myself from thinking. I love not knowing how the image will turn out and letting the drawing evolve, surprising me along the way.

Automatism, which Allan mentions, is commonly defined as action that’s involuntary or unconscious. There is a lot of wiggle room in the art world for how literally or figuratively that term is understood. In 21 of the 24 Aetherscapes I began the image by drawing while riding in the car, sometimes looking out windows instead of at the paper, or even allowing marks to happen with my eyes closed. I relax and let the marks accrue by feel, inviting accidents and irregularities, but with a felt sense of an emerging pattern. These theoretically ‘random’ stimulus drawings evolve in the studio to reveal remarkably intricate configurations which I did not, and could not, plan.

Entrancements? Allan has beautiful words. Similarly, Elmar R. Gruber from the Collection of Mediumistic Art in Munich, Germany, offers terms to contextualize how I work. He calls me a “conscious channel.” Josef Kotzian is an example he gave of another artist who was technically trained, and highly skilled, but working intuitively, navigating influences in a collaborative manner rather than from involuntary movements in a trance. I do regularly experience waves of blissful energy, heightened clarity of mind, and very distorted experiences of time when I’m drawing, a kind of journeying.

Accidents do happen within my creative process. I’ve had my pencil, all of a sudden, flip out of my hand only to make an impossible-to-erase mark that then leads to a whole new passage of imagery. Drawing in the car, actively inviting unpredictability from the bumps and swerves … well, happy accidents happen more frequently when you invite them.

Reciprocations. That observation deserves its own whole book. But for now I’ll just say that exhibiting and releasing this work is my reciprocation to the Universe for the inspiration I receive and the energy that comes to help me realize the drawings.

*IN PARTICULAR*, drawing 8×6 in., detail, photos courtesy Cavin-Morris Gallery, the artist

Alessandro Keegan notes that Efficacies drawings feature veins, seeds, and cellular forms that shift between body and universe. What draws you to this imagery?

Alessandro is observant and he reads energy well. I am drawn to botanical as well as visceral and cellular imagery. Identifying, labeling, categorizing, those are all left-brain language-based functions I am not engaging with as I draw. Part of my gift is the ability to have a firewall keeping words at bay while I create. I go ‘right brain’ into spatial perception, and rhythmic motion. Alessandro, in his essay for my Efficacies catalog, does discuss how that series was drawn during the year I was recovering from the concussion, accurately highlighting ways that my imagery reflects that experience of neuronal injury and repair.

It seems useful here to recall Freud’s insight that dream images are multi determined, many references, many meanings, multiple memories, associations, all simultaneously true. The Surrealists and those pioneering the therapeutic use of art made a leap, applying Freud’s insights about dream imagery and unconscious processes to visual art. One can retroactively assess and interpret imagery, mining it for insight into one’s own unconscious. But one can also invite deeper insights and revelations by pursuing the creation of imagery, seeding an evolution across multiple works.

Veins, yes, but the forms I draw simultaneously read as nerves, roots, tendrils, electrical currents, even lightning. It’s the bifurcating, the organic pattern, I’m primarily engaging with in this example; the phenomenological metaphor, rather than a concrete illustrating of this or that. People see different things in my drawings at different times, which make them dynamic and compelling to live with.

The drawings, in a way, are active, and activate-able, dynamic reflection tools that resist reductive interpretation. I don’t particularly care what other people think my forms are. I care about what the images are doing for me as I draw. I care about how they feel.

*Activate,* 7×5 in., photos courtesy Cavin-Morris Gallery, the artist

In both Efficacies and Aetherscapes, your drawings move between body-like images and vast open worlds. How do you think about this mix of the intimate and the expansive in your work?

This is true. From the vantage point of interconnection, and you can even call it ‘oneness’, the body is inextricably embedded in the world and integral to the existence of everything else. The body, then, is an instrument for experiencing the connection, or imagined (but impossible) disconnection. I’ve learned to purposefully connect to the larger all and everything, and sustain the flow of energy and peace I experience there.

Some viewers tell me they feel the calm or comfort, or inspiration convey. It’s very personal, and transpersonal at the same time — another way of saying micro/macro. It’s very fair to say, my relationship to body and soul, of creation to creative force, is in fact my subject matter.

*Appear,* 7×5 in., photos courtesy Cavin-Morris Gallery, the artist

This exhibition includes two separate catalogs, one for each series. Why was it important for you to publish them separately, and how do the texts help frame your work?

The EFFICACIES & AETHERSCAPES exhibition does feature two distinct bodies of work interspersed within the installation. I produced a book for each series because they are in fact distinct statements, though very much related. It was important to me to preserve the chronological development of each body of work, to have a way for each set of drawings to remain together as a larger statement long after the individual originals find their way into the world.

These are the first catalogs I have realized. They celebrate EFFICACIES & AETHERSCAPES as my first solo feature of biomorphic works. Eventually I will have a book for each of the series in my archive. All of the biomorphic works will come into print first. And then I will make books about my earlier figurations, collages, poetry, and other creative outputs. My vision is a little library that allows others to explore my whole life’s work. While biomorphic imagery has been with me all along the way, it’s become my primary focus since 2011. The essays that Alessandro and Allan wrote for my catalogs are special. They reflect a larger process that facilitated my acclimation to having highly personal works shared widely.

The drawings in each series differ, as do the backgrounds and personalities of each author. While images are multi-determined for their creator, they are also so for the viewer. Free association and projection, Freud observed, are psychological mechanisms, tools for the interpretation of images, psychological defenses, personality structures and experiential imprints.

They also are ways to build connection through shared insight, and understanding. That’s another take on reciprocity. I am providing unique imagery, and viewers give me back their experience of the drawings, a highly gratifying exchange.

I very much appreciate how each author looked deeply and shared their encounter candidly with me, and with readers through their written statements. Their views are their own, each puzzling through associations, projections and multi-valenced insights. It has been a very powerful experience to feel received and understood by them.

Smokowski at Cavin-Morris Gallery, photo courtesy the artist

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AETHERSCAPES AND EFFICACIES: BIOMORPHIC DRAWINGS
BY FRANCES SMOKOWSKI through October 25, 2025
at Cavin Morris Gallery 529 West 20th Street, 3rd Floor, 3w
New York, NY 10011 @cavinmorrisgallery @francessmokowski

About the writer: Etty Yaniv is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, curator, and founder of Art Spiel. She works in installation, painting, and mixed media, and has shown her art in exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Since 2018 she has published interviews and reviews through Art Spiel, often focusing on underrecognized voices and smaller venues. The publication also serves as a platform for writers, supporting new voices in writing about art. Yaniv’s studio practice is central to her work, and she is also active in the ongoing conversation around contemporary art. More about her art can be found at ettyyanivstudio.com and on Instagram @etty.yaniv