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Always one step ahead of the pack, Smith has moved away from the sparse hide-the-object installationism towards a b-wurtz-like awkward modernism, where objects, though still mysterio, experience no disinclination to proclaim themselves as objects in a gallery, like no-problem, but, often looking more awkward for it, placed with an obtuseness, and never resolve themselves into it in any tidy manner.
From his Yale grad exhibition to now, Smith’s work has moved further into the realm of odd material fetishism, without adornment, in space.
From magazines and fluorescent liquids to weed-whipper-heads covered in oatmeal, to skull-chips, to now lightning rods, and clarinets swallowed snake-like inside pvc tubes, and prehistoric whale ear bone fossils attached to footballs. Moves from dark ambience to clear-view contraptionism of a product-like strangeness.