GREG SMITH

GREG SMITH (b. 1970) stages exhibitions that consider the possibilities and problems presented by our current technological deluge. He builds installations using an amalgam of unlikely materials and processes that trace contemporary limits of language, ownership, and governance. Through his enigmatic work, the artist delivers coded messages that reward the...

Words fail Greg Smith. So, Absent Word Double is an experiment-cum-exhibition in which the artist jettisons all but 2048 of them. The remaining 2048 words are both a truncated language and a future year taken from the BiP39 protocol (a preferred way of securing digital assets). As such, Absent Word...

I see an opening: technology has changed the game, once again democratizing what had required outsized resources. Blockchain technology brings bureaucracy creation to the people, opening up the possibility of making ministries that are particular, domestically scaled, or even boutique. And the accompanying markets are trivial to set up, all while maintaining a bureaucratic character. Rest assured, the familiar elements are present but now everyone has the opportunity to tinker.

For Zero Width Non-Joiner, Greg Smith collaborates with thousands of lines of computer code. In part written by the artist, and in part assembled from modules available on the internet, this code serves as the circumscriptive but not-quite-present landscape in the video, set, objects, and drawings. The film, Total Runout, Heavy Sparkle, shows our protagonist navigating a space where the environment, and the cameras themselves, appear to determine much of the action.

As we all know most road movies come to a disappointing end. This one begins in disappointment, yet our hero/artist/”artifice mechanic” refuses to accept the inevitable. Through a series of performances the artist pimps his ride customizing the car first to serve as mission control and finally altering it to the point the driver is seated backward in order to face the video monitors in the rear. The car moves, or seems to, but the driver’s experience is completely mediated and motion not necessarily forward.

A fragmented piece of looped text, “ners Banners Banners Ban,” serves as the title and starting point for Greg Smith’s fourth show with the Gallery, an exhibition with loops and repetitions at its core. Setting the stage, the obsessive, circular drawing series, “Things I Should Have Read,” covers plenty of ground, only to end where it began. Similarly structured in time rather than space, the video, aptly titled “Loop,” is presented as a continuous cycle that echoes the physical configuration of its subject.

For better or worse, there are associations that go along with the beard: disguise, masculinity, Santa Claus, homosexuality, survivalism, fundamentalism, and wisdom, for example. My beard shape is used to build objects, mechanical devices, and a set; these in turn are used to construct a range of scenarios, including those that are well outside (and perhaps even antagonistic toward) these familiar associations and stereotypes. -Greg Smith

The asterisk is often associated with the fine print, the qualification, or the caveat. It also provides us with a fresh start in that mythic American way, tucking away inconvenient truths while at the same time keeping them close at hand for (possible) later examination. The asterisk opens just enough space so that optimism might breathe, with caveats.

"Summer of Love '07" - a conscious repost to the uptown exhibition of the same name, a montage of contemporary equivalents: excess, youth, hippy chic, war, wayward souls - Bruce Conner, Hope Gangloff, Annette Lemieux, Simone Shubuck, Greg Smith, and Christopher Ulivo.