Parsons Paris-November 16-28, 2009
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This exhibition will include selections from recent bodies of work by Craig Smith. These include the ‘HRM Drawings’ produced with Colin Beatty and ‘Tag South.’
The series HRM Drawings were produced in a live, collaborative art event produced by Craig Smith and Colin Beatty. The event, staged during the summer of 2007, was held in the ‘Riverama’ exhibition space of the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers NY. This space is used by the museum as a permanent teaching gallery. The gallery features a section of the historic Hudson River (Northeastern United States) represented through a ten metre long diorama. The diorama is marked with numbered sections illustrating particular botanical and geologic features of the actual river system.
Smith and Beatty created this series of ink drawings, carbon transfers and graphite rubbings on the surface of the diorama, following a series of performance operations established by the artists in relation to the exhibition space. The operations included flying remote control helicopters throughout the exhibition space and over the representation of the river system. After landing the helicopters on the diorama each landing area was numbered to its corresponding area. These numbers correspond to those appearing in the drawings, linking the diorama, the actions of the performance, and the drawings. Further, each landing area on the diorama differed in its geological representation or ‘surface conditions.’ The surface conditions directed further marks (rubbings and tracings) by the artists onto each drawing; marks which demonstrate a human body adapting to the conditions of the actual river system.
The Tag South diptych presents two separate surfaces upon which physical, sporting engagement is possible. Instead of imaging such engagement, the images remain surfaces for potential engagement, that which has happened or has yet to happen. Like the damming of water systems in the American Midwest, Tag South has been created in locations resulting from physical interaction. Tag South was created between the boundaries of university intramural athletic fields in the state of Florida, USA. The state of Florida produces a repeating ‘set’ of high-tier athletes each year in their public high schools and universities. Additionally, the state benefits economically from a generous arrangement of professional sports facilities and recreation areas. Thus Tag South is an assembly that combines the space and time for particular, physical activities by human bodies with economic affects and pedagogical impact.
Craig Smith uses the photographic to provide a comprehensive ‘demonstration’ image. The ‘demonstration’ image is an organised, totalised set of procedural methods. These methods are intended to outline the successive steps necessary to stage an audience’s encounter with an artwork and with an artist. A demonstration image allows the photograph to operate like a witness, calling out with an exaggerated sense of the circumstances leading to its production. This application of the photographic as a ‘demonstration’ is therefore an attempt by the artist to visually compose the total and complete system of a relational artwork. Such a composition includes a visual record of the event and of the sentiment and dialogue that can exist between an image and a viewer.
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