Artist Statement:
My work focuses on the remembrance of intimate personal experiences of natural environments. For most of my career I have focused on forest and wild urban settings. I grab bits and pieces of recollections and construct assemblages of imagery to create an abstract natural scene. As such, the final product is not a rendering of a place but rather a scattered recollection which mimics how we recall a place and time. I mix hard edges, softened shapes,negative space, gestures and lines to pull the viewer’s eye across the surface. This lets them join me in creating their own scattered recollection. For the multimedia works which I am submitting, I overlay the 2d imagery back upon the video. I also utilize enhanced ambient location audio as a “binder” of the experience. I package all of this into a unified immersive experience as an alter to that memory.
Artist Bio:
John Smither is originally from the Chicago area and grew up in the Midwest with an MFA in printmaking from Washington Univ. in St. Louis. While in grad school he also became interested in working with video. Once out of school he moved back to Chicago where he continued to make relief prints, video, and large-scale drawings. His subject matter focused on the urban and wild landscapes of the area. At that time, due to technical limitations, he was never able to integrate these mediums into satisfying installations, so the different media were typically worked independently. After showing in Chicago at solo and group events for many years he moved to Seattle. In Seattle, he continued to work on large-scale drawings and paintings based on the local environment of the Pacific Northwest. In 2010 he cofounded Core, a non-profit gallery, in Pioneer Square. At about the same time, with video tools being much more affordable and accessible, he also started to reintroduce video into his work. Fast forward to the present day, he creates integrated installations of paintings, woodcuts, and video of various sizes. He has shown his work at numerous venues across the US with occasional forays abroad. His work is included in many private and public collections. John's studio is in Georgetown’s Equinox complex.
