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November 21, 2008

Mickey Smith photography at the new, Invisible-Exports Gallery

Mickey Smith photography at Invisible-Exports Gallery.

Mickey_smith_blood_coll So it's been a very busy Fall Art season for Dr. Quiz and MAO. This week we actually got to speak with both Jerry Saltz, and Roberta Smith over cocktails Tuesday night. Jerry is oh so much shorter more outgoing than we expected. And, Ms. Roberta...well...she was... Flawless!! As expected.

But one thing we did manage to luckily squeeze into our schedule, was the packed opening last week of the first New York City Solo show for photographer Mickey Smith.

You may know Mickey's work for Jen Bekman's 20 x 200 project.. so far both of her photos there sold out (in both the small and mid size) in just a few minutes.  We missed both!! DAMN!

So clearly.. there's a lot of Mickey Smith fans out there in art blog world. Others may know Mickey's work from The Center for Photography at Woodstock..where she has been featured on the cover of their magazine.. as well as having her work shown there this summer.

Mickey Smith's show is titled "You People" and is up at the Invisible-Exports Gallery until Dec 21th.

(Photo #1, Mickey Smith, Collocation No. 7 (BLOOD), 2008, Forty archival inkjet prints on canvas,
16 x 24 inches each, Edition of 3)

The work, which features her photos of bound periodical magazines, we found totally fascinating. It remained both, Dr. Quiz and MAO of our muchyounger  college days of late night research sessions spent in the dark library stacks.  Mickey refers to herself as a cultural archaeologist... and hence you might say.. MAO really digs her photography work!! Sorry... couldn't help ourselves with that one!

Well..here's a snippet from the gallery press release.. the show is great.. don't miss it! 

FYI... This is only the second show for this new gallery..Invisible-Exports.. hopefully one of many good ones to follow.. because, what this young gallery lacks in shear size.. it's 2 thoughtful owners make up with high energy and big personality!   Clearly one art combination well worth checking out this weekend if you find yourself on the hip lower east side of new york city!

A big MAO Congrats go out to Mickey, Risa, and Ben. We wish you all the best.

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... Mickey Smith is a cultural archaeologist and You People is her reclamation project. The books and bound periodicals she photographs are a fossil record the 20th century unknowingly left behind. In their own time, these periodicals represented to their readers a concrete and tangible common culture — each reader knowing that there are thousands, perhaps millions, of people around the country reading the very same things — unifying communities of subscribers around shared interests, shared standards and shared identities. But looking at them past their expirations dates has the opposite effect: the publications seem insufficient, the audience for them a universe of disparate and disunited lives, only loosely bound. They become something else, the meaning shifting from their content to the viewer’s own inherited history.

Mickey Smith’s photographs deal with themes of association and disassociation. The titles, repeated one after the other on the shelves of libraries across America, represent a cultural heritage, a kind of serial aspiration on the part of an immigrant nation toward a finally resolved sense of identity. But as Smith shows, forming an identity is not as simple as clustering around one node — or periodical — rather than another. Instead, by showcasing the repetition of these words, she highlights their incantatory power—and suggests that identity and culture have always been a matter not of neat categories but of vague associations.

Mickey Smith is a McKnight Artist Fellow in Photography and has received grants from FORECAST Public Art Affairs and CEC ArtsLink. Currently, her work can be seen at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, in Woodstock, New York, and the Pushkin House as part of the Contemporary Art in Traditional Museums Festival in St. Petersburg, Russia

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Nice show.. great work..
I love books.. and photography so it doesn't get any better.
Thanks for pointing this one out.

My favorite ones of the series are the Blue Blood ones. Talking to Mickey, she told me that she found those in NYC as being part of an East Coast mentality. I guess we can be quite grand in the Northeast!

i love mickey smith's work!

it's gorgeous and compelling : )

i love mickey smith's work!

it's gorgeous and compelling : )

That's lovely. As there are no untaken pictures left, a magnificent variation is a gift.

Very informative post about Mickey Smith photography at the new, Invisible-Exports Gallery! Keep the nice job. We would love to see more.

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