Lucien Smith “A Clean Sweep”
The Suzanne Geiss Company
This event has ended.
The Suzanne Geiss Company presents an exhibition by Lucien Smith of brooms and Polaroids. Motivated by the transformations of downtown New York during the reign of former mayor Rudolf Giuliani, Smith has assumed the task of documenting the relics of a bygone New York. Through a series of categorical Polaroids and a sculptural installation, Smith remembers the once raw cityscape that was smoothed in favor of gentrification.
The main gallery will host a legion of freestanding brooms that inspire contradictory allusions. When grouped together, they are magicked into an anthropomorphized army. On the other hand, they recall the daily dirt and purge of the city. Sense-of-place readymades, the brooms were collected by Smith and his friends off the streets as they walked to the studio each morning. In 43 sleeves of nine Polaroids each, Smith documents New York with scientific efficiency. With a biologist’s or baseball card collector’s enthusiasm for organization and subtle differentiation, the functional objects and natural adornments of New York City’s streets are categorized. Trashcans, crosswalks, park signs, bodegas and piles of slush take on new importance when grouped together with their peer genuses.
Lucien Smith was born in 1989 in Los Angeles, California. He lives and works in New York, New York. Smith received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2011.
Media
Schedule
from May 08, 2013 to June 22, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-05-08 from 18:00 to 20:00