SMAC Gallery is pleased to present a selection of new work by gallery and associated artists, opening on 5 December 2025 from 11h00 at Miami Beach Convention Center, 1901 Convention Center Drive, Miami Beach, Florida. Participating artists include Frances Goodman, Wallen Mapondera, Marlene Steyn and Baba Tjeko. Frances Goodman South African artist Frances Goodman (b. 1975, Johannesburg) is an interdisciplinary artist who works across installation, photography, sculpture, and sound, articulating a nuanced inquiry into contemporary femininity. Her work engages critically with constructions of beauty and desire, interrogating the ways in which female identity is shaped, disciplined, and often destabilised by pervasive media narratives and societal expectations Goodman employs materials and techniques traditionally associated with dressmaking, craft, adornment, and the broader beauty economy—acrylic nails, false eyelashes, sequins, needlework, and crochet—mobilising them as both medium and metaphor. Through this recontextualisation, she subverts the visual lexicon of beauty culture, exposing the mechanisms through which identity becomes commodified and aestheticised. Enthralled by the construction of an ‘image’ and the ‘self’, Frances Goodman approaches notions of assembly through a level of intimacy that makes clear the thorough purposefulness of one’s own construction. Each nail, glinting ceramic and sequinned sequence is arranged as a reminder of the effort belied by ‘effortlessness’, naturality and every assumption in between. Both in awe of the human form and attentive to our willingness to adapt to (or reject) social design and designation, Goodman’s works create a parallel mirage to the facade of conventional beauty. The artist’s visuality utilises the same fantasy often used against womanhood to engage with the affliction of being reduced to one’s image. With vivid colours and sensory textures, the resulting artworks are often sensual and unguarded, celebrating Goodman’s ability to juxtapose dense subject matter with a delicate touch. Drawing from the craft of dressmaking, acts of adornment and the proliferating beauty industry, the artist’s work often ignites discourse around ideas of ‘influence’, desire, shame and resentment. She is critical of the impact of the male gaze as well as the ongoing inner critique that many women torment themselves and one another with, highlighting the multiple avenues of criticism that the female form faces, and the relentless torture of pursuing the ever-elusive idea of ‘perfection’ oft riddled with outdated ideas of morality, purity and submission. Goodman’s practice interrogates the point at which identity shifts from an innate condition to a carefully assembled construct, shaped by external expectations and internal negotiations. Her deliberate defiance—visible, urgent, and necessary—unsettles those inherited boundaries and exposes the systems that seek to shape the self. Wallen Mapondera Zimbabwean multidisciplinary artist Wallen Mapondera (b. 1985, Harare) operates at the intersection of painting, sculpture, and installation, employing a complex material lexicon drawn from the detritus of everyday commerce. His practice centres on the transformation of discarded packaging—egg cartons, cardboard, textile remnants—through processes of cutting, stitching, layering, and modular aggregation. These acts of meticulous reconstitution engage with questions of labour, temporality, and resourcefulness within a socio-economic landscape defined by precarity, hyperinflation, and systemic dispossession. Mapondera’s material strategies resonate with the principles of Arte Povera while entering into dialogue with contemporary African practitioners such as El Anatsui, Ibrahim Mahama, and Nnenna Okore, who similarly transpose modernist legacies into explorations of postcolonial and socio-cultural discourse. In Mapondera’s hands, the discarded is neither inert nor valueless; it is reclaimed as a site of memory, symbolic potency, and ontological flux. Central to his practice is a profound attention to the symbology embedded in objects crafted by human hands: each form conveys insight not only into individual and collective identity but also into society at large, and the artist’s own ancestral lineage. There exists an agile empathy within the grooves of folded card, the clusters of seeds, and the repurposed cloth—a sensibility that requires recognition of human action and its accumulating consequences in order to be fully apprehended. Anchored in the Shona dictum kura uone (“mature, and then you will see”), Mapondera’s work reflects on inherited responsibility and communal memory. His chromatic register, determined by the inherent hues of found materials—egg cartons, palm seeds, tarpaulin, baize, cardboard—compresses geographies, affective histories, and embodied labour into each assemblage. Through a thematic constellation of faith, grief, love, and regeneration, Mapondera revisits the cyclical symbolism of the seed and the egg, embedding these motifs of continuity and becoming within the conceptual architecture of his oeuvre. Marlene Steyn South African artist Marlene Steyn (b. 1989, Cape Town) is a figurative painter and sculptor whose practice is grounded in radical theory, psychology, and art-historical memory. Drawing from a wide range of references, Steyn’s elaborate serial “self-portraits” seamlessly interweave self-reflection with the quest for connection. Part dreamscape, part landscape, and part portraiture, Steyn’s practice knits figures together in forms that evoke the partially dissociated, half-remembered language of dreams. She explores her figures in myriad ways, intricately connecting them with their surroundings and the spaces between, often intentionally blurring the line between positive and negative space. The environments she depicts are regularly animated with human faces—reams of noses and knowing eyes, smiling lips, and undulating, unfolding bodies—expressing the notion of embodiment as intrinsically linked to other bodies: human, animal, mythical, and otherwise. Here, the female form takes center stage amid a fusion of organic and domestic elements as Steyn seamlessly interweaves self-reflection with the search for connection, drawing inspiration from diverse aspects of her own life, including femininity, motherhood, and childlike wonder. Out of these landscapes, Steyn’s ceramics emerge through a more tactile, spontaneous approach in which materials yield to gravity, instability, and conditioning. These smaller clay forms appear as if they have fallen from the painted landscapes themselves— a constellation of scattered shapes, tangible manifestations of her unconscious mind. Steyn describes her practice as a form of archaeological excavation, exposing her personal dreams and desires, her inner child, and fleeting thoughts and memories. Her making is a slow process and a painterly meditation aimed at becoming more comfortable with all “her parts.” Ultimately, Steyn seeks to blur and blend her physical, psychological, and conceptual margins, allowing her to express herself beyond a language defined by binary oppositions. Baba Tjeko South African multidisciplinary artist Baba Tjeko (b. 1985, Vredefort) employs bold linework as a conduit through which he interrogates cultural memory and identity within the contemporary visual sphere. His meticulously composed works synthesize traditional and digitally mediated painting techniques into complex, collage-like compositions that traverse multiple visual languages—from geometric abstraction and figuration to expressionism and the surreal. Working across printmaking, drawing, graphic design, painting, and illustration, Tjeko stages a sustained dialogue between Basotho visual traditions and Eurocentric aesthetic frameworks, producing monumental works that critically examine the ways in which traditional culture informs, shapes, and is reconfigured in contemporary constructions of Black identity. Tjeko’s complex compositions reflect a nuanced dialogue between heritage and contemporary modes of expression. His monochromatic portraiture evokes personal and communal memory, drawing from his working-class upbringing and emphasizing qualities of simplicity, kindness, love, and community—values he perceives as increasingly absent in a digitally mediated, image-conscious society. In his colourised works, Tjeko captures the stylized, digitized aesthetics of contemporary life while tracing an emotional lineage back to his home, honoring the shapes, colours, and traditions that inspire him. Among these influences are Tjeko’s Litema-inspired prints, a contemporary reimagining of the traditional Basotho mural art historically practiced by women. Traditionally executed with mud, paint, and colored stones, Litema celebrates the Basotho people’s ancestral connection to the land. In Tjeko’s hands, these motifs are both preserved and transformed, bridging historical practice with contemporary expression, safeguarding cultural symbols while translating them into a visual language of the present. Much of Tjeko’s recent practice is defined by complex compositions with richly textured surfaces. Tjeko’s pairings that explore memory, lineage, and the subtle reverberations of heritage within contemporary culture. Through the interplay of form, narrative, and spatial composition, he cultivates a visual language that is at once reflective, archival, and forward-looking.