Smith Townsend Collaborative at Artfields 2018

Smith Townsend Collaborative 

at 

Artfields SC

I am pleased to report that Travis Townsend and I (Brandon C. Smith) won a Merit award at this years Artfields.  Artfields is an art competition and festival located in Lake City SC.  We were honored to be part of the 400+ artists to exhibit throughout the city as part of the city wide exhibition.  Our work was installed in the R.O.B. building which is a large warehouse building divided into exhibition spaces.

 "View of the Big Nothing from an Abandoned Perch Atop Pink Meat Pod Island (With Godbird Watching)"
Photo: Travis Townsed                              

From our statement: 

Now in our tenth year of engaging in collaborative projects, SmithTownsendCollaborative presents view of the big nothing from an abandoned perch atop pink meat pod island (with Godbird watching). As we've done before, we've overlapped our visual languages to try to create something that neither one of us would make on our own. And this work picks up on some of the narratives our past projects have suggested while attempting to thoughtfully explore the theme of emptiness.

 "View of the Big Nothing from an Abandoned Perch Atop Pink Meat Pod Island (With Godbird Watching)" 
Photo: Travis Townsed 

From our statement: 

The wall-drawn component connects via a long hinged wooden "chain" to a rather largish, pinkish, meaty-looking pod of Brandon's creation. On top of the pod is a lonely little remnant of a brick house with an empty chair in it. The chair views the big empty blob on the wall as Godbird (the strange-looking painted bird sculpture) watches from his high perch on the wall. There are some other components, too, that adds to the narrative possibilities. So, not love of emptiness or fear of emptiness so much as just normal, kind of dumb, and lonely-human-on-a-rock-in-a-big-void kind of emptiness.

"View of the Big Nothing from an Abandoned Perch Atop Pink Meat Pod Island (With Godbird Watching)" 
Photo: Travis Townsed 

"View of the Big Nothing from an Abandoned Perch Atop Pink Meat Pod Island (With Godbird Watching)" 
Photo: Travis Townsed 

"View of the Big Nothing from an Abandoned Perch Atop Pink Meat Pod Island (With Godbird Watching)" 
Photo: Travis Townsed 

First Day and Last Day

Today is the last day for Corporeal Anxieties at Eastern Kentucky University.  Hunter and I would like to thank Esther Randall, Travis Townsend Alisha Denny (pictured in all of the images but one) for all of the work they did to make this show happen and also all of the students and faculty who attended the show.  I would like to also thank my painting students at the University of Kentucky for attending the opening. 

Since this is the last day of the show, I thought it would be fitting to post a few picture of the first day.  These pictures were sent to me by Esther Randall the gallery director of the Giles Gallery at EKU.

 Hunter is on the ladder doing the heavy lifting while I, well direct.  This doesn't fit my memory of installing the show but here it is, documented in real time, I am saying "a little lower on the right."  "That's it."

I am not sure why, but this image has a sort of a desperate "Raft of the Medusa" quality to me.  We seem to be clinging to the ladder for salvation, and I guess that's not completely inaccurate.  There is certainly a lot of opportunity for things to go horribly wrong here but luckily they didn't.  We will be repeating this drama for the de-install so....

      

Soon, I will be posting images of the show after it was all put together with proper lighting.  It was a good a show, Hunter and I look forward to re-creating and adapting it for future spaces and scenarios.  For now, this was a very good first collaboration.

I went to Eastern Kentucky University for my undergraduate degree and have spent a fair amount of time in the Giles Gallery looking at shows, being involved in shows and was honored once again, to have an opportunity to show my work in the place where my professional artistic journey began.

In some ways, the Giles Gallery is where I decided to pursue art.  It is where I first experienced the kind of challenging art that makes you bite the heel of your hand in desperation.  There was a very specific "happening" where one man rubbed mud all over another naked man and then scraped it off.  I couldn't stand it.  I was mad about it.  I told all of my friends about the overwhelming ridiculous thing I had seen and we laughed and shook our heads but I couldn't stop asking myself "why" had he done this thing.  What was he trying to communicate to me, a young person from eastern Kentucky, sitting on the floor of the gallery, bug eyed and unbelieving?  So I changed my major to art.  It was the right thing to do.

    


 
  

Flesh Pod, Flesh Pod sketch, Flesh Pod - in the round

First, the Flesh Pod.

The work I am calling your attention to is the fleshy meat pod on the right side of the image, the one that seems to be fat rolls mounded up on a large fleshy belly.  The above image is from an exhibition that Travis Townsend and I had as the Smith Townsend Collaborative at Miami University in Oxford Ohio in Nov 2012.  (For more images of that show click this link.)

I don't remember the original idea kernel for this painting but like most of my work, it had something to do with a large and ungainly physical presence.  I found the first sketch for this work today as I was roaming the occasionally fertile fields of my sketchbook looking for that long forgotten sketch that must be squeezed to life from pigment and oil.

 
 So here it is just above, the sketch before the pod.  The final work is surprisingly similar to its loosely scrawled beginnings but for the top mound.  That particular mound of flesh which carried from this initial sketch into the final work, looked too much like a phallus.  An adjustment had to be made and in the final painting the top is more like a fleshy thumb and mitten-ed hand pinching upward.

In Oct 2013, Travis and I installed a show at the New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art and I brought a stack of work to the gallery not knowing exactly which pieces we would include.  Flesh Pod wasn't included in the show at New Harmony because we went with paintings of meat pods that had stronger connections to boats and vessels.  The title of that show was "Smith Townsend Collaborative: The Grand Armada."

 

When I store my large sticky decal paintings, I stick them down to clear plastic and roll them onto cardboard tubes.  I tend to store 5 or 6 on the same roll.  This image was taken during the New Harmony install and I thought there was something interesting about this semi-transparent stack of pods and how much it emphasizes the flatness of the paintings.  In the background you can see a large 3-D pod that I created for this show and in some ways the 3-D pod looks less volumetric than the painting.

The smaller sketch from my sketchbook drawing is not a preparatory drawing for the 3-D pod but it almost could be.  One idea I had for the Flesh Pod painting in the beginning was to have it constrained with ropes and chords and in the end the painting wasn't but the 3-D pod was.   The future of 3-D flesh pods is uncertain but the connection between original drawing and final work is always part of my process.