SHAWN SMITH
In All Probability
September 6 - September 30, 2006
PRESS RELEASE


Exhibition Page

Working from informed pixilated images, Oakland based artist Shawn Smith produces sculptural representations of real world objects visually translated and reformed by way of digital construction. Smith's colorful rec-room styled taxidermy line-up presents a quirky, almost animated version of the digitally converted forms. Making the intangible tangible, Smith employs an organic base material of wood and vibrantly colored ink to create square peg-like stakes that join together to impart a three-dimensional direct rendition of artificially informed images. Smith's "Re-Things" series incorporates a selection of pixilated mackerel and grouper fish, deer heads, and a floor level zebra skin in their vivacious new identities, once again removing the natural reality beyond the digital structure for a final translation as experienced with Smith's sculptures.

Smith's interest is concerned with ways of knowing as implied by the method of information exchange-of which most rapidly induced visual information about real world objects are accessed via new-world inventions, most specifically, the computer screen and television. In this manner, nature as witnessed first hand is broken and transformed in an effort to represent digitized real life counterparts by groups of pixels. The emphasis is then placed squarely on the process of informing, of which Smith works only from the artificial castings, recreating a visual allowance by way of a third constructed representation of the artificial.

Smith received an MFA in sculpture from California College of the Arts, Oakland and a BFA in Printmaking from Washington University. Smith's work has been shown extensively in San Francisco, Oakland and Texas, most recently taking part in a large scale survey show, Sampling Oakland at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, highlighting a selection of noteworthy emerging artists in the East Bay.