Greg Parma Smith: Things in the Air

Start with the two hooded DJs, cross-legged at a drum pad and mixer. Rainbow-colored sine waves arc and bend between them. They sit inside a field of red devotional light. Forms gather around them: triskeles, pinwheels, target circles, stars. They loop, they return. Stay with that motion; it sets the tempo.

Two more figurative paintings enter as counterpoints. A trio of lute players, their pink, low-poly skin feels digitally built, recalls Caravaggio. A female figure, in faceted cool greys and charcoal, contemplates a sickle moon and listens, turned inward.

The symbols, close-up and one by one, are in between. A peach triskele on sage green, planet-like orbs spin at its tips. A many-pointed star inside a thin rainbow halo floats on pink. A rose window against a coral background with a yellow star fixed at its center. Each is a slow drone in oil.

Then a concrete chamber. Part bunker, part temple, it opens to a cerulean blue sky. A yellow sun star holds the center. It’s the architecture for everything else. A place of sustained attention reaching for the trance on the other side of the noise.

Greg Parma Smith (b. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983) lives and works in New York. He earned his MFA at Columbia in 2007, where he studied with artist-critic John Miller. He sometimes plays with Miller’s band Macarena XXX, the scratchy, glitchy, raw noise band Miller started with artist-filmmaker Tony Conrad and artist-writer-musician-performer Jutta Koether. That downtown lineage hums through this show.