Matt Sheridan Smith "Blanks, Templates, Undos, Redos"

Lisa Cooley Fine Art

poster for Matt Sheridan Smith "Blanks, Templates, Undos, Redos"

This event has ended.

Each work in Blanks, Templates, Undos, Redos begins by pairing coded, conventional forms with external or generative content. Smith then voids, doubles, and copies the works, creating new units and iterations where meaning can coalesce or simply evaporate. The resulting stand-ins, blanks and readymades reveal the sometimes arbitrary ways in which originality, intention, and value are assessed.

Themes and strategies drawn from Classical sculpture and literature permeate the exhibition. Greco-Roman culture was marked by an ambiguous distinction between original and copy. Classical texts were distributed through an oral tradition, and variations over time were incorporated into the original without attribution. Geometric formulas directed artists towards a standardized aesthetic ideal. Most canonical sculptures are acknowledged copies, three or four generations removed from a no longer extant original. This approach to iteration informs a number of works in the show.

In a new series of drawings, Smith has covered a block of lorem ipsum text with a layer of scratch-off ink. The prints are scratched back to reveal a second layer of seemingly impenetrable content, inverting the traditional gesture of drawing. Although lorem ipsum derives from a work by Cicero, it has, like a game of telephone, lost all meaning through endless cut-copy-paste and use as placeholder text by graphic designers.

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Schedule

from April 18, 2009 to May 24, 2009

Opening Reception on 2009-04-18 from 18:00 to 20:00

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