For inquiries, please contact: bonniesmerdon@gmail.com
Painting with acrylic on canvas, Bonnie allows landscape and her daily surroundings to motivate her artwork. Smerdon gathers imagery for her paintings on neighborhood walks, long distance bike tours and ventures into the backcountry. Smerdon refers to ordinary visual objects such as highways, streetlights and residential architecture. These devices are placed in specific lighting and atmospheric spaces to push commonplace scenes into the uncanny or bizarre. By focusing on the ordinary, her work taps into a collective memory bank allowing space for empathy and wonder, in relation to our landscape. Bonnie’s background in modern dance informs the quality of light and compositional elements that appear throughout her work. Smerdon invites performance and other media practices to inform how she approaches painting.
Bonnie Smerdon (b. 1992) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and sculpture from Western Washington University. She has participated in residencies including The Old School, in Hrisey, Iceland, and Sou’wester, in Seaview, Washington. Smerdon has exhibited nationally and internationally, with exhibitions including those at the Schack Art Center, Ryan James Fine Arts, Geheim Gallery, and Studio 103 at Tashiro Kaplan. Bonnie’s artwork has been featured and written about in The Cascadia Daily, What’s Up! Magazine, and Future Fields. Bonnie currently lives in Bellingham, Washington.