Be kind, rewind—and peep some of Korine’s pieces, below.
'BLOCKBUSTER' is open now until October 20, at Gagosian in NYC.
Lead photo by Sam Hayes; art photos by Rob McKeever; all courtesy of Gagosian.
For the next nine months, we met regularly at her mother’s sunlit studio in Williamsburg. "Thunder Girl" grew out of those visits. It pulls from both old and new work: paintings, photos, memes, stray sketches, and scribbles from rehab. Together they form an honest, messy (in the best way) portrait of her life. The book has range. Some pages are serious and revealing, others are unhinged and fully fried. That push and pull became the heart of the project.
Our sessions were full of tangents. Marika’s archive is massive, and we’re both easily distracted. We ended up creating a kind of assembly line. She’d slide something across the table, and I would photograph or scan it. Every piece had a story, and we had fun figuring out how they spoke to one another. Once everything lived in InDesign, we spent weeks moving spreads around, searching for the right rhythm, the right order, the right chaos.
We hope you enjoy checking this project out. We’re having a release party on December 11th from 6-9 at Reena Spaulings Gallery, 165 E Broadway, NYC. Come hang out, chat with us, and flip through a copy. <3
The effect is a kind of visual anthropology: memory as debris field, architecture as witness. Smith toys with the instability of images, how they circulate, who controls them, and what happens when the artist becomes archivist, caretaker, and cultural mediator all at once.
Born in Brooklyn and raised in Kingston’s Waterhouse district, Smith has long dissolved the boundaries between conceptual art, fashion, and vernacular storytelling. His practice examines the politics and economies of image-making while preserving the stories that mainstream cultural iconography often overlooks.
At Art Basel Miami Beach, these new works feel like a homecoming: not nostalgic, but defiantly present. They anchor Caribbean social worlds in physical form, holding space for a community whose histories are too often unrecorded. In Smith’s hands, transformation isn’t just metaphor; it’s material.
© Akeem Smith. Courtesy of the artist and Heidi, Berlin. Photographs by GRAYSC
