Brian Smith
“Making art, for me, is about observing and translating how we encounter the world and the experiences we have.”
Interview by Rochelle Roberts
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?
I was born in New York and grew up in Burlington, Vermont for the majority of my upbringing. In 2016 I received my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. From there I moved to Brooklyn, New York where I lived and worked for a couple of years before returning to school for my MFA. I received my Master of Fine Arts in Studio Arts last spring from Maine College of Art in Portland, and have been local in the months since then.
Though my educational background is more specific to sculpture, I’ve lately been integrating photography—both originals and found photographs—into my sculpture work, or as standalone pieces that have yet to be shown. The main theme I’ve gathered from this past year is just how important experimentation and failure are to a successful art practice—it’s where the fun and magic lives in artmaking, for me.
Your work tends to incorporate a mix of different media, including photography, sculpture, and painting. Could you tell us a bit more about the process of creating these works and how they come together as finished pieces?
Absolutely. As mentioned before, integrating photography and painting with my sculpture work is part of this new explorative practice I’ve been working with in the past year. Materials hold such an inherent connotation or history. I find that above being a sculptor, photographer, painter, etc. I’m a mixed media artist who taps into certain artistic skill sets as deemed necessary by the content of the work I am producing. Rather than segmenting my practice, I simply see those modes of making as materials available for use when needed.
It’s been important to listen to what the work is telling me. Recently I was excited to mesh elements of sculpture and photography together on a new piece I’ve been working on. Inevitably, I found myself hitting a wall creatively. I was enticed by the idea that this sculpture (made of metal, chains, and resin) should demand an element of photography, but I realized it’d be suited better as part of a painting. I’ll typically work on multiple different art pieces at once to allow for pauses in my process and moments of pivot as necessary.
Precedent at the Water- A Symphony of Queers, 2020, Photographed by Nick Pierce
Figgot The Tree!, 2019, Photographed by Nick Pierce
Figgot The Tree!, 2019, Photographed by Nick Pierce (Detail)
There seems to be a close relationship between nature and queer identity in your work, particularly in a piece like Figgot The Tree! which shows a leaf pierced by a gold ring that is reminiscent of a penis with a Prince Albert piercing. Can you explain how these two aspects work together when creating your art?
Making art, for me, is about observing and translating how we encounter the world and the experiences we have; In many ways, every piece I’ve made is a self-exploration or self-portrait. To that extent, there are qualities of myself that are difficult or impossible to divorce from who I am, and this shows up in my work. As with many, queerness is a part of myself that was encouraged by society to be dim throughout the early years when I was first understanding that quality of myself. At this point, snapping back like a rubber band, it’s something that I feel urgently should be present in everything I do. Yes, queerness involves sexual attraction, but it is also this amorphous energy that is challenging to define, and questions the routine/understanding everything.
My research into Queer Ecology solidifies that the construct of natural vs. unnatural revolves around human-centric ideals and is ultimately invalid. For example, a forest is a good habitat for a moose, a cabin in those woods is a subcategory environment for a human, and Bifidobacteria live in the gut of the human that lives in the cabin that is within the woods that the moose also lives in. To that extent, all the elements in this example could be categorized as natural, although to many, the idea of home building, heating, and plumbing are oftentimes viewed as an “unnatural” human trait. This confounding viewpoint is transferable to urban environments as well, and so on. I guess this is a long-winded way of saying that the word nature/natural is either all-encompassing or means nothing at all and there’s queerness in questioning this concept; therefore when I use tropes of the human construct of nature within my work, my hope is that it evokes questions of what is truly natural—if anything.
As a kind of extension of the previous question, can you talk a bit about your relationship to climate grief and how your concerns about the climate crisis manifest itself in your work?
A couple of years ago I was experiencing my first Maine winter, which for those who are familiar will know of the harsh chill from the rocky coastline and the seemingly never-ending length of it all. With a mixture of seasonal affective disorder, stress from graduate school, and anxiety from the flood of doomsday adjacent media articles, I found myself becoming attune to my surroundings, and I started noticing the power of influence the non-human world has on humans, and how important it is to shift our ways of living to be more collaborative members of the earth. As I navigated this newfound feeling of unease, I stumbled upon the term eco-anxiety which is exactly what you’d think it is.
I wanted to make work that acknowledges the climate grief I, and many, were/are experiencing, and visually propose alternatives to the path laid out in front of us. My work more recently seeks to evoke efforts of hybridization with the world, and formats for collaboration with other creatures and vegetation. The goal is to create artworks that may allow one to identify with elements of the environment outside, or within, the human experience.
Buoyant in the Ecoanxiety, 2020
Mirror Displacement After Smithson- Maine Sunrise through wildfire haze from the North American West, 2020
Now Seems As Good A Time As Any (photograph detail), 2020
Now Seems As Good A Time As Any, 2020
Can you tell us which artists influence your work?
Currently, I’m infatuated with the work of Giovanni Vetere and his underwater performances. The way he creates environments and imagined creatures as part of an ecosystem he exists within is truly compelling and seems to hint at a world we know nothing yet about.
Rasmus Myrup is an artist who I started looking towards as I began this avenue of making work that centers queer ecology. He is extremely successful at dissolving the term natural for the viewer. I don’t think I’ll get over the installation he had up at the Jack Barrett gallery which I regretfully discovered online after it had come down. The photos are exciting in themselves and I can only imagine seeing the work in person.
Thankfully I did have the chance to see the breathtaking opera Sun & Sea (Marina) by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė when I went with my graduate cohort to Venice. This piece, in its seeming simplicity, captures succinctly what I aim to accomplish with my own work. The way the performers cycle through the nuances of daily life in a changing world of chaos with such nonchalance is eerie and poignant, I think, in addressing the inactivity we’re bringing to the climate catastrophe.
How do you go about naming your work?
For the longest time, I felt stuck in naming my works. I had it in my mind that shorter was better, therefore most pieces ended up getting a single-word title, which ultimately felt fairly limiting.
As my work evolved with time, I realized that titling the works is its own form of art, rather than a legend to understanding the pieces on display. My titles lengthened, oftentimes beginning as a paragraph until the energy of that paragraph could be whittled down to a sentence or so. I find that my titles personify the works in a way that makes the title feel like a clip from a dialogue between the object and another. Maybe one day I’ll get it together enough to have multiple works in a series tell an epic tale or something along those lines.
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
I’m currently working on some new pieces that I’m excited to debut in an upcoming group exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Maine. That show should be running March through April if all goes well with the state of the pandemic.
Otherwise, this spring I’ll be an adjunct professor at Maine College of Art which will be a new/exciting experience for me as I haven’t taught before, but am eager to do so.
As the world (hopefully) begins to spin again, I’ll be in search mode for residency opportunities for the upcoming summer and fall, as well as gallery shows to have on the horizon. Give me a holler if you have any leads 😉.
All images are courtesy of the artist
Date of publication: 21/01/21
