Sally Smart's work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in the Asia-Pacific region, in shows ranging from the Biennale Jogja in 2005 to 2006 Contemporary Commonwealth , which included rising artists from the former British Empire. Her touring solo shows have crisscrossed Australia in recent years as well. Smart's colorful wall assemblages of painted felt and other materials combine mixed-media collage, intellectual sampling, and historical references to create fractured, epic spectacles that are part fantasy, part social critique. Sharing sensibilities with international contemporaries such as Kara Walker, whose silhouettes confront the history of racism and the American South, and Swoon, whose graffiti-inspired, wheat-pasted pieces address urban mythologies, Smart is ready for broader recognition.

In her US solo debut this year at Postmasters Gallery in New York, The Exquisite Pirate , Smart resurrected the history of female pirates. The all-encompassing installation deposited viewers into a ghostly armada hovering on the gallery walls, accented by skull-and-crossbones details such as an electric blue pirate flag whipping from the main mast and a bleached skeleton strung up from a ship's prow. Mixing layers of multi-patterned, multi-textured fabric to evoke spatial depth and dynamism, her patchwork aesthetic borrows from the two-dimensional forms of Indonesian wayang shadow puppets. The Exquisite Pirate also refers back to Foucault's treatise on heterotopia, in which he describes boats as a place without a place. In Smart's work, female pirates embody a history without a history.

Smart has also presented art in public contexts. In 2001 her Family Tree House installation covered the four-story billboard facade of the Visible Art Foundation's Republic Tower in Melbourne, looming over passersby. The tree's structure gave form to a fairy-tale vision of domestic relationships, with each branch and stem containing its own vignette. A fiercely innovative voice in feminist and post-colonial art, Smart deftly handles weighty material with a light touch.

-AM