On Saturday, Amanda Michelle Smith’s ceramic painting “Virtual Reality” will be sold at auction via Unibrow, the startup begun by her husband, Casey Jex Smith. “It’s the culmination of 11 1/2 years of effort. It’s been overwhelming for our family, but we’re hoping for some good to come out of it,” she says. “We go to LA this week for the show and live auction.”

Unibrow is a platform that connects artists with collectors through the auction process, “a uniquely suited, time-tested way to find a sweet spot in pricing that the artist can live with and buyer will be happy to pay,” says the website.

The painting shows five young girls in pink, frilly dresses wandering around a jungle setting with virtual reality headsets. One girl stands on top of a palm tree pointing a weapon in the general direction of the other four. It’s as cute as it is unsettling. “My work involves fables that explore questions of social hierarchies, politics, and morality,” says the artist, who currently resides with her husband and two children in Provo, but grew up in Naples, Florida, and Fostoria, Ohio. She received a BFA in ceramics from Bowling Green State University in Ohio and an MFA in spatial arts from San Jose State University.  “Employing traditional ceramic decorative techniques like decalling, sprigging, lustering, and china painting has afforded my work a classically ceramic aesthetic and has allowed me to make archival, singular, handmade art objects in a world of the ephemeral, mass-produced and/or disposable.”

The Smiths in their Provo home.

To see more of her work visit amandamichellesmith.com

Best Of (2018) curated by Emily Larsen

Best Of

15 Bytes’ end-of-the-year feature asking Utah artists, “What was the coolest thing that happened to you this year?”