Emily Mae Smith’s work combines references to artistic movements of the past, including Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Surrealism, and Pop Art, with a profoundly contemporary sensitivity, influenced by the linguistic devices of digital and computer graphics. In a delicate balance between the analog, manual and traditional aspects of oil painting on the one hand and a reference to the accuracy of the digital production of images and graphic design on the other, her works convey an entirely personal visual universe, inhabited by a lexicon of signs and symbols dominated by the artist’s avatar, an anthropomorphized broom. The reassuring and disturbing figure takes on ever-changing forms and roles to convey reflections on disparate contemporary issues, from gender to sexuality, from capitalism to violence. This element—both concrete and imaginary—is both symptom and protagonist of a visionary reinterpretation of reality. Smith’s works are proposed as openings on dreamlike worlds, almost windows that allow one to peek at remote landscapes and postures known to the history of art, in a contamination of worlds and imaginations that blend together in a completely new iconographic apparatus. The series of works on paper especially produced for the 58th October Salon represents a synthesis of recurring themes in the artist’s production, reflects the variety of her subjects and the eclecticism of her sources of inspiration.