Intimate Strangers
9’ 9” x 17’ 3” x 19’ 7”
Digitally printed vinyl, used aluminum cans and plastic, nylon thread, wood, fieldstones
2016
2016 FSP/Jerome Fellow
Artist Statement
I play with photographic images in a sculptural way. I do this using a computer-code like language and intuitive organic compositions related to natural processes of growth and decay. I act out apparent contradictions to capture synchronicity and the fleeting sensation of the present moment. My language is an ever-expanding vocabulary of actions, which I carry out on familiar photographic images. Examples of actions which take place in digital, physical and mental space are: layering, grafting, mirroring, combining, reversing, looping, scattering, isolating, weaving, transferring and rotating. As the image passes through several actions, it emerges as unfamiliar which in turn feels idiosyncratic and alive. Photography is at the core of this game as it conveys the paradox of time and space being both fixed and fluid and can be used to show how image and language are never one and the same. Through transforming these familiar images and changing my relationship to them, I hope to ease the tension between apparent opposites like: memory and forgetting, the self and the community, body and mind, originality and appropriation, depth and surface, difference and sameness and black and white thinking in general.
David B. Smith
Born: Washington DC, 1977
Resides: Brooklyn, NY, USA
Education
MFA, Bard College, 2007
BS, Oberlin College, 1999