Community Garden: Works by David B. Smith on view in the Workshop Gallery
Works by David B. Smith
Located in The Workshop Gallery, Building 3.
Opening Reception on Friday, August 23rd from 3-6 pm
Artist Talk on Saturday, August 24th at 11 am
Closes Sunday, October 6th
Gallery Hours: Friday to Sunday from 12-4 pm.
In Community Garden, visitors are invited to explore a maze of neon-green vine sculptures intertwined with red velvet heart-berries - a space of growth, care, and expression. The surrounding walls hold a selection of textile works depicting members of an other-worldly community. Smith created these with an improvisational yet ordered process of photo-weaving, sewing, printing, tufting, painting, quilting and embroidery to merge pop culture and speculative fiction references with game-design, ecology, and psychology - reflecting the unique complexity of each individual. Smith, who struggled to express himself verbally as a younger person, found outlets in textile crafts and gardening, which he learned from his Jewish grandmothers, and offers creativity as a means for personal development, healing and building an inclusive and abundant future. He invites visitors to wander and make connections like one would in a community garden - a space to explore harmonious relations with organic processes, one’s self, and each other through acts of belonging, solidarity, vulnerability and support.
David B. Smith makes fabric-based photo-sculpture, installation, and sound performance to explore fantasy, loss, commodity, and connection in American culture. To gain access to the back-end of cultural memory, he playfully rearranges iconography using pseudo programming code - consisting of digital and analog fragmentation, accreditation, and reorientation. He isolates patterns, crosses wires, and entertains poetic interpretations, making the once familiar strange and unsettling, yet oddly cozy.
Smith holds an MFA from Bard College and has been awarded fellowships and residencies by Apex Art, Socrates Sculpture Park, Textile Arts Center, Millay Arts, Alfred University, Marble House Project, and I-Park. Smith’s work has appeared in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, The International Center of Photography, Johannes Vogt Gallery, Museum Rijswijk, Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Asia Song Society, with solo shows at East Tennessee State University, Millersville University, SUNY Cortland, Halsey McKay Gallery, Geary Contemporary and David B. Smith Gallery in Denver, CO (a different David B. Smith). His work is in the collections of Peggy Cooper Cafritz, Beth Rudin DeWoody, and Yale University, and has been discussed in The Observer, VICE, Time Out, The Washington Post, and the New York Times.
Instagram: @davidbsmith_