Volume documents bound periodicals and journals in public libraries. The books are not touched, artificially lit, or manipulated— rather created by the librarian and found in the stacks— positioned by the last anonymous reader. The focus is on simple, provocative titles that, through scale, transcend the spines on which they appear to create conceptual, anthropological works.
Large scale installations from this series, which Smith refers to as Collocations, deal with with themes of association and disassociation. The titles, repeated one after the other on the library shelves, represent a cultural heritage, a kind of serial aspiration. By showcasing the repetition of words, their incantatory power suggests that identity and culture have always been a matter not of neat categories, but of vague associations.