Kiki Smith stayed away from skin for a long time.

(Like, as a subject, she’s been real close to her skin for a while now.) She explained, “I don’t like personality.” And skin seemed too individual “whereas livers are more anonymous...though livers probably have real personalities, but people just wouldn’t know how to read them.” Luckily for Smith, if there are more than 7 people in the same room they morph into a bipedal blob, which solved her problem with individuality nicely.

Smith is known in the art world for “bringing the body back,” which sounds like a dance move closely related to the” monster mash” and would mesh nicely with her belief that we are all Frankenstein's monsters. She prefers bodies, at least in her art, to be indistinct; she always works with small models because she “can’t imagine what that feels like...it’s an abstraction to be so small. Smallness also allows her work to sidestep sexuality, not prudishly, just so that the work can be feminine without being sexualized. Here, in Untitled (Skin), Smith has gone incredibly small. Each portion of body is just a blip on the grid.

No bodies here, no sex, no personality, just bits and pieces. You could read this as a we’re all stardust kind of thing, insignificant but unified and it’s likely that Smith would be at least a little bit into that reading. She loves “nice little hippy narratives” and once described herself as a “tree murderer” for cutting a Eucalyptus down, saying “they seem soft.”

Her cosmic musings distract from a decidedly “not fashionable” moral weight which is probably leftover from her childhood aspirations of becoming a nun. Lorna Simpson said that Smith has the luxury (re: whiteness) of being read as universal. And in this case that’s true. I mean, look how many swatches of person she has on those canvases. 1,254 persons to be exact, or the entire population of Mulberry, Indiana.

Despite her cosmic aspirations and her growing appreciation for skin, Smith’s fascination with the personalities of internal organs remains her primary interest. When informed that a friend’s uncle had lived with 5 different hearts she was aghast, “Wow, really? What a greedy f*ck.”