Nationality American Name Mickey Smith | Role Photographer | |
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Notable work Believe You MeCollocationsDenudationVolumeYou People Awards Independent Music Award for Best Design - Album Art / Photography Known for Conceptual art, Photography | ||
Mickey Smith (born 1972 in Duluth, Minnesota, U.S.) is an American photographer and conceptual artist working in Auckland, New Zealand. Her works have exhibited throughout the United States, in Europe, China, and Russia. Mickey has received a McKnight Artist Fellowship for Photography as well as grants from Forecast Public Art, CEC ArtsLink, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She is represented by Invisible-Exports gallery in New York.
Contents
Volume
In her series, Volume (2006-2010), Smith photographed library-stack sets of bound periodicals to memorialize them as shared objects of a common literary culture, now passed. Volume documented bound periodicals and journals in public libraries. The books and words are not touched, artificially lit, or manipulated – rather created by the librarian, found in the stacks, and positioned by the last anonymous reader. The focus was on simple, provocative titles that transcend the spines on which they appear to create conceptual, language-based, anthropological works. Smith's large scale installations, Collocations, were an evolution of the Volume series.
Believe You Me
In Believe You Me (2010), she examined the manner in which books and book-learning continue to deliver status even in a culture that has turned away from reading—indeed even more powerfully, and more pervasively, than in eras that had not yet given up on the book as a storehouse of knowledge. In these contemporary images, books have become vacant props, drafted into private battles and culture wars out of a desperate nostalgia for the fading power of the written word.
Denudation
In her new series, Denudation (2012), Mickey Smith presents a mesmerizing kind of in-situ laboratory-style photography—the image as evidentiary document, the print as cold case. The stark, dark photographs in this new exhibition test the limits of objectivity and the false consolation of casualness even as, in the tradition of documentary and crime-scene photography, the images aspire to conscientious neutrality. The photographs document those objects discarded within an abandoned library, but their formal objectivity is no guard against the ghosts of narrative, perceived or imagined.
Awards
Public Art Year in Review Project Winner, 2010
LMCC Manhattan Community Arts Fund Grantee, 2009
Permanent Commission Recipient, University of Florida, 2009
CEC Artslink Grantee, 2008
Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers [Nominee], 2008
Fulbright Research Fellowship [Finalist + Alternate], 2008
FORECAST Public Artworks Public Art Affairs Grantee, 2007
Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward [Honorable Mention], 2007
McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowship for Photography, 2006
Collections
Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, NY
Dorsey & Whitney, Minneapolis, MN
Fidelity Corporate Art Collection, Boston, MA
Fredrickson & Byron, Minneapolis, MN
Miami Dade Public Library, Miami, FL
Minnesota Historical Society, Saint Paul, MN
Northland Collection, Saint Paul, MN
North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN