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INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is pleased to announce Mickey Smith’s participation in VOLTA NY, with a solo-booth of new work.
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For centuries, the library was the lifeblood of culture, the central repository of Western intellectual activity. Nowadays, we think of the library as a cemetery, where the written word, as it’s presented in newspapers, magazines and even books, goes to die; where printed matter exits its period of relevance and enters its period of neglect.
Mickey Smith is a cultural archeologist and Volume is her reclamation project. The books and bound periodicals she photographs are a fossil record the 20th century unknowingly left behind. In their own time, these periodicals represented to their readers a concrete and tangible common culture — each reader knowing that there are thousands, perhaps millions, of people around the country reading the very same things — unifying communities of subscribers around shared interests, shared standards and shared identities. But looking at them past their expiration dates has the opposite effect: the publications seem insufficient, the audience for them a universe of disparate and disunited lives, only loosely bound. They become something else, the meaning shifting from their content to the viewer’s own inherited history.
Mickey Smith’s photographs deal with themes of association and disassociation. The titles, repeated one after the other on the shelves of libraries across America, represent a cultural heritage, a kind of serial aspiration on the part of an immigrant nation toward a finally resolved sense of identity. But as Smith shows, forming an identity is not as simple as clustering around one node — or periodical — rather than another. Instead, by showcasing the repetition of these words, she highlights their incantatory power—and suggests that identity and culture have always been a matter not of neat categories but of vague associations.
Mickey Smith is a McKnight Artist Fellow in Photography and has received grants from FORECAST Public Art Affairs, CEC ArtsLink, and LMCC. Her work has been featured as special projects in ESOPUS Magazine (Fall 2009) and Abe’s Penny (NADA Special Edition). A major glass installation of her NATURE collocation is permanently installed at the University of Florida in Gainesville. She has been recently awarded at residency at PVArt and will be having her second solo show with INVISIBLE-EXPORTS in the Fall of 2010.
VOLTA NY is open Thursday, 2pm-8pm and Friday through Sunday, 11am-7pm at 7 West 34th Street, between 5th and 6th avenues.
More about Volta NY visit: www.voltashow.com