About |||||||

Hannah Smith is a Kentucky-based artist who creates sculptures and installations that merge Pop Art references and assemblage strategies with a rebellious punk attitude. Employing recognizable imagery and unconventional materials, Smith has developed a playful and unpretentious art practice that offers a complex vision of society, where flashy objects reveal themselves to be gaudy, cheap, and even a little bit grimy. In a style that could be described as "abject Americana," her work suggests the way in which blue collar aesthetics can embody political and social ideologies of discontent. 

Smith's past exhibitions featured tiny Astroturf landscapes with roadside attractions flickering false promises, lightboxes gradually shifting in color like radioactive sunsets, and vinyl decals of daisies sprouting from giant Band-Aids. Sourcing light from animated LED circuits, fiberoptics, and electroluminescent wire, and wrapping power cords in denim fabric, her constructions read as neon-hued distortions of contemporary life.

In Homestyle Smith further develops her coded iconography, mining the material culture of her working-class background: "I am interested in presenting a vision of middle America that exposes the ways in which capitalism exploits our very basic humanness: our desires, our dreams, and our love." Her sculptures take the form of empty fast-food baskets, oversized ornamental tassels that spin erratically, and miniaturized signs illuminating seedy motels -- abstracted versions of low cost and accessible commodities that saturate our everyday surroundings. But look past their blinking lights and metallic veneer and the face of a snarling dog emerges, a symbol, for Smith, of the underlying aggression that accompanies the failure of the American Dream for a large sector of the working population for whom social mobility remains elusive.  

With her embrace of vernacular materials, references to kitsch and mass production, and the casual, intuitive way in which she assembles and installs her work, Smith seems to be extending a sculptural lineage that includes Rachel Harrison's lumpy, awkward forms and Isa Genzken's precariously teetering installations of pop culture detritus. Her work is perhaps more conceptually aligned with Cady Noland's provisional arrangements of highly charged objects of consumption (i.e., cans of Budweiser beer, hamburger buns, advertisements) and social control (police barricades, aluminum fencing). Noland's provocative installations of the late 1980s and '90s presented a fierce critique of the ways in which American capitalist interests perpetuate both psychological and physical violence by distorting reality, shaping appetites, and objectifying people. Like Noland, Smith inserts the spirit of social unrest into her practice, and her sculptural collages -- though subversively humorous -- capture the tension inherent in the inextricable intertwining of class, power, and human desire.