olde words made new

 

kathy’s collecting data to write my biography (& my autobiography) – cool… can’t wait to become famous and appear on hollywood squares.  i gathered together my newspaper reviews for her, and i was struck by the words others have used to paint me.  here’s 3 excerpts on my 1st 1-man show at spaces gallery 22 years ago… these mean something because they were written about an unknown me by folk who had no idea who or what i was.  i don’t appear to have changed much since then.

Wide Open Spaces – Geraldine Wojno Kiefer – Cleveland Edition – 9.13.1984

Smith, a computer programmer by day and object maker by night, stalks the streets like many of us stalk bargains. He comes up with stuff as unrelated as rubber eyes and automobile nameplates, then fits them into his own glittering icons, which, although unlike Krider’s ethereal statements in their gutsy out-of-the-gutter immediacy, recall them in intensity and drive.

Smith’s work bursts out of the aesthetic realm and confronts religion treated as an empty formality, along with other modern horrors like war, gossip, dishonesty and torn human relationships. And it does so literally, as bits of broken glass, fencing and metal shards spring menacingly out of the picture into our space. Some of Smith’s fantasies are part of public domain, some are intensely personal, but all are unremitting and barbed with wit. 

Spiritual Fulfillment – Sally Norman – Dialogue Magazine – 9.1984

Steve Smith uses pop images in a more overtly corrosive and downbeat manner. Grafting the flea market funkiness of Rauschenberg onto the Cubist fracture of Schwitters, he joins toy soldiers, plastic Jesuses, and ancient newsprint in collages that explore the potency of cultural symbols.

He gives his works titles like “The Validity of Relationships” and “Exploration of Conscience,” weighty subjects that he interprets by using baubles fit for the junkyard – a cheapening of central cultural themes intended as an attack. He drives the attack home with the bite of rusted wire, shattered glass and obscene imagery.

His works acquire additional sting because in using icons that either represent or can be made to represent ideas, he is, in a sense, using cultural themes as found objects. The implications of this can be disturbing. 

Art Gallery Plugged In To Shock – Helen Cullinan – Plain Dealer – 9.25.1984

Steven Smith shows a variety of found-object relief constructions using newspaper and collage elements, old miniature toys, bits of glitter and mechanical scraps, whatever. The results are interesting and provocative, but more morbid than poetic. Joseph Cornell he is not.

But there is something in Smith’s compositions other than poetry or Cornell’s cosmos; rather the visualization of probing and seeking, differing vastly from one work to the next.

“I deal in symbolic juxtapositions of the odd and unwanted,” Smith writes in his show statement. “My materials consist of cultural castoffs, sociological implications and the refuse known as suburban thought. My goals are simple; erase your labels; learn to look about … Learn to see dead frog and rust and thus re-see yourself.”