Eponanonymous

In Matt Sheridan Smith’s current solo show at Lisa Cooley Fine Art, “Blanks, Templates, Undos, Redos,” the artist presents a group of works generated, in one way or another, from the logic of standard sizes and automated processes.  The exhibition exploits the promise of some mythical, undifferentiated potential that is built into every artist’s encounter with raw materials while they remain unsoiled by one’s ultimately futile attempts to improve upon their unblemished condition.

Smith’s show suggests, Why overdo it?  Indeed, why overdo anything, when undoing it or redoing it will suffice?  Each work here is marked by subtly clever twists to the logic of the standards that are the starting point of the piece.  The piece Paper Sculpture (A1, A2, A3, A4) translates these four standard paper sizes into sheets of 3/4 inch MDF, which are then arranged, post-minimalist style, into a sculptural stack.  A viewer circulating around the stack senses an internal logic to the arrangement that never quite yields to much more than the idea of “being in a stack”.  And yet, materially, through the evocative rhythm of seams and empty spaces, the conceptual heritage of Serial art is ironically manifested within the domain of ubiquitous office products, a legacy which seems mundane, save the totalizing effects of international business efficiencies.  It begins to feel less mundane when one considers that those efficiencies are intended to facilitate commerce by taking certain fundamental components of exchange (“the paper it’s printed on”) out of the equation, and eliminate that piece of paper as the site of any possible incommensurate confusions.

Matt Sheridan Smith, Paper Sculpture (A1, A2, A3, A4), 2009, MDF, 18 x 23.5 x 33 inches

The strongest works in the exhibition are the eight pieces under the title Neither is there anyone who loves pain itself.  They follow up on a process Smith used to produce a group of five pieces shown at the gallery in 2008, using scratch-off ink over the top of a screenprinted image.  Smith prints the “background” image, covers it with the scratch-off ink, and then scribbles into the surface to reveal the ground.  Whereas the pieces from 2008 were explicitly about the logic of “throwing good money after bad”, Neither is there… takes a more abstract approach to the idea of filling up, covering up, uncovering, and emptying.  By creating colored backgrounds composed of Lorem Ipsum, an endless flow of Latin text used as a placeholder (but whose translation yields the works title), the artist puts a void beneath the heavily opaque layer of scratch-off ink.  The act of “revealing” through erasure is utterly contradicted; in fact, the catalog of erasure techniques pursued across the eight surfaces amounts to a portrait of creative anxiety in the face of a crippling, and liberating, realization:  nothing to communicate, and no way to communicate it.

But of course, that’s not really the case, which brings me to the logic that underwrites the logic of the standards.  Smith makes cunning use of the expressive possibility of unspoken language.  The last moment when silence holds, just before it yields to the differentiating finality of the language imperative, this pregnant pause is the tension that puts energy into Smith’s show. Untitled (the omission of one or more words that are obviously understood but that must be supplied to make a construction grammatically complete) takes this tension as its generating logic.  By repeatedly typing ellipses into Microsoft Word (and letting the program “autocorrect” them by replacing the three periods with a properly formatted ellipsis), Smith produces a painted “text” that cannot ever be “read”:  Is it on the tip of your tongue?  Too obvious to even say?  Something you can’t quite find the words for?  A lacuna in language that is understood even without being spoken?  That an ellipsis could stand for any of these things shows its inability to function on its own as a provider of meaning.  If it marks the surface as the site for meaningful exchange, it’s really telling us that the exchange must always be displaced into the much more fraught and nebulous domain of one’s own inconstant prejudices.

That’s a lot to tackle for a white painting with a few dots on it, and in this viewer’s opinion, the work does not get there as a piece that can function visually on its own to make the point.  But it’s an ambitious theme, and it ultimately makes its way into the foundational premise beneath all the works in this exhibition.  Smith’s work is impressive for saying a lot by insisting on the containers that hold the last moment of silence, and by untwisting and retwisting the little loops of logic that compel the economies of our daily exchange, both commercial and psychological.