COREY SMITH | BECOME A BETTER YOU
COREY SMITH | BECOME A BETTER YOU
November 3rd – November 27th, 2011
Presented by: COMUNE & CAPiTA
Opening Reception
Thursday, November 3rd | 7:00pm – 10:00pm
AR4T Gallery is proud to present a vocal and poignant solo show from Los Angeles based artist Corey Smith. Turning his focus from celebrity obsession and obsolete dreams to the unnamed citizen, Smith exposes the soft underbelly of Americana without losing the gloss.
Inspired by get-rich-quick schemes, exercise equipment, absurdity of extreme sports, weight-loss plans, and modern strategies for success and happiness, this collection exhibits Smith’s signature clean and minimalist techniques. “My work is about sharing,” he said last month while preparing the all-new works, which will be showcased all month. “I have a lot of ideas and I need to manifest them as immediately as possible, life is short.”
ABOUT: COREY SMITH ///
www.coreysmithtimetravel.com
www.highpoweredstreetdrugs.com
wwww.springbreaksnowboards.com
www.thecomune.com
Corey Smith is a painter, sculptor and photographer from Portland, OR, who currently resides in downtown Los Angeles, CA. He has been exhibiting his work in galleries all over the US for over ten years. Smith has been featured in countless print magazines and online sources.
Smith’s high-gloss, ultra-flat paintings capture the joys of plasticity and pre-fab environments, celebrity as the ultimate blank canvas, and the absurd hyperboles of modern leisure. But rather than repackage the manufactured world into an aestheticized form–a la post-Warholian Pop–Smith favors a post-Pop approach that brings into day-glo focus the dark vision at the corner of the spectator’s eye. The paintings find their subject in the tension between the works’ fatalistic undercurrents and the celebratory aura created by Smith’s use of bold color and bright-lined contour.
His sculptures and mixed media works develop some of these same themes, but rather than map plasticity onto flat canvas, Smith instead maps flatness onto plastic forms–whether by painting across arrays of commercially molded objects or by making use of the naturally deflective precision-cut panes of modern machinery.
Smith’s photography develops some of the same themes as his sculpture and painting–surface, extremity–but abandons ironies for a more intimate perspective. Most of his subjects are close friends or lovers, and Smith documents them at points where excess bleeds either into empathy or its impossibility, and where the romance of abandon intersects with abandonment.
His works are a Death Valley realism, infused with both sunny Californian optimism and morbid premonition. This is awful, deeply wrong, utterly fantastical stuff–a distillation of a time, a place, and a generation that are always already beside themselves.
Corey Smith is currently the art director at COMUNE, curator of the Drop City artist collective, contributing artist for CAPiTA snowboards, and founder of Spring Break snowboards.
COMUNE was formed from the idea that there will always be people out there who not only embrace the rawness and imperfections of everyday life but use it to creatively push the boundaries of what’s possible creatively their own way, with complete disregard of the consequences. Our goal is to provide clothing that reflects this lifestyle of carefree idealism and to support the people that choose to live it.
CAPiTA Snowboarding is based on the fishing docks of Seattle, Washington and is recognized throughout the industry for unique graphics, progressive product, and world-class athletes. www.capitasnowboarding.com
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For Inquiries about this artist or show email info@AR4T.com
