January 12 – March 4, 2023
Coffee talk with the artist:
Saturday, February 11, 2023
2:00 – 4:00 pm
CLAMP is pleased to announce “ARCHITETTURA,” a collection of photographs by artist Mickey Smith relating specifically to the practice of architecture. A presentation of selected works from the collection will be displayed on the gallery’s mezzanine through March 4, 2023, with an expansive solo exhibition of the larger series titled “VOLUME” planned for the main gallery in 2024 to coincide with the 20th-year anniversary of the beginning of the project.
“ARCHITETTURA” draws from Smith’s ongoing body of work “VOLUME,” which documents bound periodicals and journals in public libraries. In the images Smith does not alter reality through lighting or manipulation. The artist leaves the books as they are found and photographs them as they were seen in the library. The majority of bound periodicals and journals photographed over that time have since been deaccessioned, so Smith’s images now represent the sole record of their existence. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Menand writes of the series: “One important thing about the images is their found-ness. The photographs are taken from life; they’re not made from props in a studio. The artist was on library safari.”
It is only through framing and angle, by deciding what is and is not included within the image itself, that Smith transforms these objects. By cutting off a word, or through repetition, Smith generates poems and lingual experiments that interact with the varying materials and colors of spines and bindings. Human interventions and indicators of age, like handwritten labeling, scuffs, and tears, act as punctuation marks to the isolated words, estranged from context, against a black abyss.