Michael E. Smith: The Makings of You

Building 4.1

Using familiar objects, Michael E. Smith creates installations that thrum with unexpected energy. Drained fish tanks, plaster-filled basketballs, and unplugged scanners exert a new – or previously unseen – sense of alertness, even swagger, in their novel conditions. Retooling objects that remain, in the artist’s words, “stubbornly themselves,” such as a piece of furniture or article of clothing, Smith tests the way that materials interact and react when placed together. He handles the shared materials of our lives with sensitivity, often coupling disparate objects in the hopes that they will be reunited with their other halves. Diverting them from their future as waste, Smith also taps into their resilience.
Smith responds to the particulars of both his materials and the spaces in which they are presented, identifying their possibilities and constraints. This often means bending the limits of traditional exhibition-making practices, which see installation as a purely additive process. Instead, Smith works like an editor, honing a narrative or a feeling by taking away as much as he adds. Splitting, trimming, and adapting his objects (or perhaps, his subjects), he alters and combines them into strange, soulful articulations. Placed in specific postures and relationships that reveal a blend of tender poetry and dark humor, the work casts, as Smith says, “one hell of a glow.”

A collaboration with the Clark Art Institute, this exhibition of new work by Michael E. Smith is curated by Emma Poveda, M.A. candidate in the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.