In “Novelty Court,” Emily Mae Smith presents paintings that employ a personalized iconography as a means toward unabashed self-assertion and its liberatory effects. For the most part, the motifs in these canvases are proprietary, culled from sources ranging from the Art Nouveau trade bulletin The Studio to Disney’s Fantasia, and they are fed by the artist’s robust interest in the history of design. Ghost Writer (all works 2014) is an extreme case, a painting which repeats the letter E five times in black paint on a white background; the middle bar of the letter, which would complete the character, has been replaced by a two-hued blue wave. Here, Smith alludes to herself through a corporatized logo, reformulating the spirit of Kurt Schwitters’s “Merz” series in the corporate graphic parlance of Microsoft’s Windows.

One conspicuous element that appears in three small paintings features a man’s toothy rictus as a framing device. The mouth reads as male because there is a handlebar mustache painted directly above it, and because of the gaping Chiclet teeth centered above and below the picture. For instance, in The Inspector, the teeth circumscribe a simplified image of a cartoonish backside. Hovering above the right cheek is a monocle, which brings to mind eyeglasses and other sight aids deployed by artists—from Pieter Brueghel the Elder to Jasper Johns—as iconographic code to mock myopic art critics. In this case, Smith adds a wry jab at the insatiable male gaze. Are we all really so obtuse and ass-hungry? Maybe. This type of graphic sophistication and screwball humor forms an incisive critique in its own right as it circumvents any dominant mode of picture-making in favor of singular intelligence and eccentricity.

— Nathaniel Lee