Paul Anthony Smith

Paul Anthony Smith (b. 1988, Jamaica) is known for works that trace the movements and memories of the Caribbean diaspora. Smith punctures the surfaces of his photographs with a handmade tool to add texture and pattern. This signature technique, which he calls picotage, is a meticulous process he derived from his early training in ceramics. The use of picotage serves as an exploration of photography’s creative potential, transforming each image into a layered, textured object.

“Jamaica” comes from the Indigenous Taíno word meaning “Land of Springs.” The exhibition title, Melodies from a running spring, suggests the artist’s dreams or visions from Jamaica. Each piece features a photographic portrait—sometimes of a single figure, other times two—set in a natural landscape. Smith’s picotage disrupts these photographs in various ways: their backgrounds are sliced by geometric grids, the landscape is obscured by fields of perforation, and in some cases, the figures dissolve almost entirely into texture.

For this series, Smith photographed two Caribbean figures—St. Thomian Olympic fencer Daryl Homer, and Jamaican interdisciplinary artist Zachary Fabri. Though their practices differ, Smith finds congruences in their life stories and physical movements. For Smith, they evoke duppies, spirits common in Jamaican folklore who bridge the past and present, resisting fixity and erasure. These images invite viewers into a space shaped by ambiguity—where memory is fragmented, meaning remains unfixed, and new ways of seeing and imagining the past can emerge.

61 x 41 x 1 ¾ inches (framed)

154.94 × 104.14 × 4.45 cm (framed)

Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin