Through the spaces of time, it gives sustenance, shelter and provides solace. Smith is part of a large and active body of Native American artists, many involved in the contemporary art world today. A member of the Flathead tribe in Montana, she is of Salish, French Cree and Shoshone heritage. She comments candidly on the present state of the western landscape, scarred and littered by Euro-American disregard. The pictograph, as we see it in Salish , originally drawn or painted onto living rock surfaces or animal skins, demonstrates the integration of humanity, nature and the Divine so characteristic of Native American belief.
Pictographs are cultural memories, fragments dotting the landscape.
The forms which Smith lays down in clearly read outlines remind us of the animals, utensils and other objects important to her people. Here we can note vessels, a hand, the stripes of a blanket. These arrange themselves in a pattern across the surface with little overlap or challenge to one another, thereby asserting the spiritual equality of all things in the land. Smith's landscape is a spiritual one, interiorized, without a horizon, utilizing modernist abstraction. Nonetheless, Smith provides us with a western landscape, as dry and textured as her scratched and scumbled painting's surface.