Capt-cha-cha: To Entail
Kim Smith is an artist interested in how words and pictures play together in communication in everyday life and in the arts. Trained as a painter (MA Painting, UC Berkeley), and as an art historian (PhD Semiotics and Art History, Brown), he has been a professor in these subject areas (UC Hayward, Montana State, RISD, Texas Tech, Univ. of Texas School of Information). In addition, he has been a senior digital media designer for three Fortune 500 computer companies (Tandy, AST, Chief Designer at Gateway). Recently he gave a series of six lectures entitled "How Pictures Work, from Cave to AI."
The artist about her work:
“Pictures are everywhere and they are no longer moored to their original time, place, or reason for creation. Scrolling the web is a bit like beachcombing where all manner of pictures have washed up on the shore inviting gathering. One may simply “pick up” some attractive selection of these pictures to make a collection. Or, as in the case of my work, use these pictures as raw material, pictorial pigment, to be arranged and juxtaposed in the creation of, perhaps, strange and wonderful mashups to be roved about in visually.
And words. They have a long history of engagement in juxtaposition with other words, as if sentenced to do so. And when juxtaposed with pictures, they have normally performed an explanatory role. In my work, especially my books, words are allowed the freedom to seek improbable associations with one another and to float freely like clouds over pictorial terrain to which they owe no obligation.
I recently completed a graphical work entitled “Joyriding in a Universe of Chance.” “Joyriding…” is radically episodic and aphoristic. It is not a traditional narrative. In fact, it might be described as a collection of self-contained micro narratives strung together as in a dream or as a series of scenes while joyriding familiar roads made strange by unexpected juxtapositions and emerging events. Here the joyride is framed loosely as a dream trip from HEre to HERe”.
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