Artist Statement
Asli Smith is a Turkish American multidisciplinary artist, raised in Istanbul and based in Brooklyn for over two decades, with a background in illustration, surface design, and textiles. Her art practice centers on the changing relationship between light and color, revealed through slow, tactile processes rooted in material exploration.
She creates her woven paintings by producing two individual works on paper, cutting them apart, and interlacing the fragments into new configurations. This process of doing and undoing mirrors the shifting nature of recollection; how moments, encounters, and dreams are held in the mind not as fixed images but as layered impressions that blend, dissolve, and reappear. The woven surface becomes a place where these fragments meet, overlap, and create new alignments. She often works with botanical dyes, rust transfers, and plant-based imprints gathered from her surroundings, allowing the materials to carry traces of place and time.
Periods spent returning to Turkey introduced Asli to weaving and deepened her engagement with natural dye practices. While distinct from the textile methods she learned, her woven paintings draw on the material awareness shaped through these experiences, particularly an understanding of how color, process, and time interact.