Nearing five hundred square feet, the well-proportioned studio practically bursts asunder from the equipment stationed inside. Filled with rolling mills, presses and vises, grinders and buffers, a large Craftsman tool chest, several work stations, file drawers and stacked boxes, including dean areas set aside for the computer and associated materials, the well-organized studio admirably serves its purpose as a sheltered environment removed from the stressful pulses of the urban life pressing on it.

From within, there periodically emerges a comprehensive series of brooches that shed a little more light on Christina Smith's versatile and enigmatic art They are key to understanding the details of her life and ideology. With a rare combination of wit and insight she addresses the pain of the continuing drama we all share: parental illness, decline and death, responsibilities and burdens, discord and divorce, relationship disputes and betrayals, lack of communication and missed opportunities, .. political and social protest, bias and intrigue.

Smith's jewelry works are mindful exercises that cut quick to the heart and near to the bone. A sadly evocative brooch, Avoiding the Toe Tags 771-A, narrates a time in her life when her mother was hospitalized with brain cancer. Her mother underwent three surgeries over the three years before she died. The tags are incised with one of the hospital room numbers that her mother inhabited. To the side is a tied bag filled with money, ironically representing her mother's foresight in obtaining supplemental insurance which paid for the huge expenditures that hospitalization requires. The solitary figure is Cameron, Smith's youngest brother and her family hero; it was he, she says, who was his mother's primary caretaker during those very difficult times. (It is also Cameron, although sometimes blurring with Smith's own self, who represents the stationary figure in much of her work.)

This brooch, as with so many of the others, makes a palpable presence, stimulating an electrifying emotional charge whether viewed close-up in person or distanced through a photographic representation. It is a matter of instinctively understanding, without exactly knowing the particulars. The brooches are intimate, chaotic scenes from her internal life, arranged with almost shocking tenderness. It hurts to view them, but also to turn away is to remove a potent, visceral connection to certain states of equilibrium we psychically seek to maintain. The constant balancing, rebalancing and counterbalancing of opposing yet similar visual juxtapositions are exhausting manifestations of the unresolved persona. But Smith gets away with it, and beautifully, intelligently, with great economy of means. She can do no less since her pure heart is in her handiwork as she fashions in a generally unconscious manner, assembling, over and over again, in one piece after another, incongruous elements into one compelling entity.

"The everyday objects that surround us can be extremely curious when seen in isolation. Familiar objects such as furniture, crutches and tools can be used as potent symbols that anchor our past with our future when removed from their present context" explains Smith.