2019 2019: Christopher T. Smith: Shifting Structures

December 12-17, 2019

Visually I am referring to manmade utilitarian structures such as buildings with brutalist architecture, grain mills, and temples or sacred places. I also allude to non-manmade structures such as canyons, buttes, the desert, devil’s tower, and the human body. All these structures communicate a sense of honesty and time. Monumental forms have an existential presence which can give a feeling of importance and permanence. But they also show the passage of time and that they are in a process of change, non-permanent.

Conceptually the thought of all things having a deteriorating structure is one that I have been investigating for a while. Whether it is a building, a concept, a cultural identity, a language or a mountain range. Within all things is a structure that can be seen folding in on itself and deteriorating as it continuously shifts into something else. Within this observation many different ideas, paradoxes, and questions emerge. I am very interested in witnessing how I interpret the world, structure and categorize it within my own folding sense of self, and then my attempt to communicate these complex ideas through forms that carry with in them my intuitions and emotions about the multivariate nature of my experience of experience.