Paul Anthony Smith's "Melodies from a running spring" appears on 300 JCDecaux bus shelters across New York, Boston, and Chicago through September 7, 2025. The black-and-white images use Smith's picotage technique—hundreds of gouged punctures—to create glitter-like or LED-like effects that obscure or emphasize details. Photographs feature St. Thomian Olympic fencer Daryl Homer and Jamaican interdisciplinary artist Zachary Fabri posed in natural landscapes; their near-life-size scale interacts with passing pedestrians. The installation occupies advertising spaces, countering color-saturated Caribbean tourist marketing and foregrounding native communities. Editions comprise 300 high-resolution prints of nine original picotage works that convincingly mimic texture.
This summer, one of the most intriguing and surprising exhibitions might find you. Paul Anthony Smith's "Melodies from a running spring", presented by Public Art Fund, is currently appearing on 300 JCDecaux bus shelters across New York, Boston, and Chicago through September 7, 2025. Once you know they exist, these black-and-white modified photographs pull you closer through their magnetic detail and unexpected placements.
Paul Anthony Smith, a Jamaican-born, New York City-based artist is known for his signature "picotage" technique - a process of gouging the surface of his photographs hundreds of times with a handmade tool (see it on his Instagram). The effect resembles glitter or LED lights from a distance and can obscure or highlight areas of the image - pulling details out of the darkness, adding a geometric background pattern, or camouflaging sections.
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