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Art News:
October 29 - December 5,
2010
Reception:
Friday, October 29:
6-8pm
INVISIBLE-EXPORTS
14A Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002 |
212-226-5447
info@invisible-exports.com
* * *
INVISIBLE-EXPORTS
is
pleased to present Believe You Me, a
solo
exhibition of new work by Mickey
Smith.
* *
*
We trust books—just
don’t
ask us to read them.
The second
solo
exhibition of work by Mickey Smith is a multi-media inquiry into the use
of
books as symbols of intellectual status in popular culture. In the
found,
restyled and original images that make up her critical series Believe You
Me, shelves of
indistinct
books are used as backdrops — in some cases simply painted curtains
—
to
perform a signaling function and confer a measure of erudition within
a
particular kind of aspirational portrait. But what signaling value can
such
images of books truly have, if they work the same way behind Martin Luther
King
as they do behind a porn star or a war criminal?
Believe You Me is an
exercise
in
exuberant appropriation art that functions, too, as an elegiac lament over
the
loss of standards and customs that govern our use of culture, and
the
two-dimensional works gathered here trace the shape of that
unfortunate
decline. In her suite of re-photographed midcentury portraits, drawn
the
Picture Collection of the New York Public Library, Smith pays a kind
of
reverent tribute to the subjects, radiant dignitaries whose presence seems
to
shine on the books behind them as much as, or more than, vice versa.
Working
with found photographs of more contemporary figures, Smith is more
whimsical
and cutting, cropping the portraits and screen-stills to highlight
the
stagecraft absurdity—and subverting, pointedly, the emanant power of the
book,
as she does, too, in a short video pieced together from reality television.
And
in a final large-format photograph, she delivers a second-order
trompe-l’oeil send-up, documenting at
a
coroner’s remove the flat and generic library curtains designed to be
hung
behind those seated for somber portraits at local photography studios,
ad-hoc
school photo days, and Wal-Mart portrait stations alike.
In her previous body
of
work, Volume,
Smith
photographed
library-stack sets of bound periodicals to memorialize those shared objects
of
a common literary culture, now passed. In
Believe
You Me, she examines the manner in which books and book imagery continue
to
deliver status even in a culture that has turned away from reading—indeed
even
more powerfully, and more pervasively, than in eras that had not yet given
up
on the book as a storehouse of knowledge and wisdom. In these
contemporary
images, books have become vacant props, drafted into private battles
and
culture wars out of a desperate nostalgia for the fading power of the
written
word.
* *
*
Mickey Smith (b.
1972
Duluth, MN USA) received a BA in Photography from Minnesota State
University,
Moorhead in 1994. Smith has received the McKnight Artist Fellowship
for
Photography as well as grants from Forecast Public Art Affairs,
CEC
ArtsLink and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has exhibited
in
New York, China and Russia. In 2010, her work was selected as one of the
40
best permanent public art works in the United States by the Americans for
the
Arts. Smith is represented by Invisible-Exports in New York.
* * *
INVISIBLE-EXPORTS
is a gallery dedicated
to
superior conceptual work. IE is located in the Lower East Side, at
14A
Orchard
Street, just north of Canal. The hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 11-6:30pm,
and by appointment. For more information, call 212 226 5447 or
email:
info@invisible-exports.com
This message was sent from INVISIBLE-EXPORTS to
artsnews@absolutearts.com. It was sent from: Invisible-Exports, 14a Orchard
Street, New York, NY 10002. You can modify/update your subscription via the link
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