UCLA Journal of Radiation Oncology SUMMER 2024 - Flipbook - Page 26
UCLA RADIATION ONCOLOGY JOURNAL
Since 1994, Smith has been cutting up and animating
prints of drawings she made during a residency
at Alfred University where she was introduced to
a maintenance worker’s large collection of dead
birds, as well as during residencies at Harvard and
Massachusetts College of Art when she discovered
the Peabody Museum’s collection of preserved animals
in glass cases. In the 1980s, she had been one of few
artists making 昀椀gurative work. During the 1990s, the
focus in the art world shifted toward bodies as a way to
investigate gender identity, but Smith’s attention had
been captured by the animals and birds, due, she says,
to “the space between fairy tale and mythology...this
was the space where people saw interconnectedness
to animals.” For several years, she made work that
was often convoluted, mixing fairy tales together so
Sleeping Beauty had the apple, but so did Eve, and so
did the witch (the latter was crafted as a self-portrait).
“It wasn’t an agenda. Things occur to you, and you
start doing them, and it takes you to strange gullies
where you never expected to be.” She went on to use
1994 drawings of wolves for her 2001 Lying with the
Wolf and of owls for Evening Star (2023) from her
most recent exhibition.
Smith recounts how a curator showed her how
in a Gustave Dore illustration, Little Red Riding
Hood, the girl and the wolf are similar in size, which
shocked her. She thought, “Girls and wolves are the
same thing: they are both beyond the pale. There is
no expectation and both are considered menacing.”
She asked her friend Geneviève to model for her as
Sainte Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris who had
convinced the wolves and sheep to lie together. For
Lying with the Wolf, she made drawings of Geneviève
standing, made copies to cut apart, and reattached
the pieces to animate the female 昀椀gure. She did the
same for the wolf from her collection of 1994 drawings.
Regardless of Smith’s lack of intention for the piece to
be read as a feminist statement, she had again made
the unseen viewable, had turned the predator docile in
the arms of a woman who is not submissive and yet is
still nurturing.
Although she admits to being part of the “cut and
paste generation” that used Xerox machines, she
continues to be fascinated by how to create movement
from a woman standing still, a bird with its wings
closed. “What I like the best,” she says, “is this
animation and reanimation of life, trying to keep things
alive for a little bit.” Evening Star was to be a tapestry
in collaboration with Magnolia Editions’ Nicholas
Price in Oakland, California. Although the loom was
dismantled before they had opportunity to weave the
tapestry, they worked for months on works on paper.
The process included working on the computer, a
technology she says she only uses rudimentarily in a
similar fashion to how she once used Xerox machines.
By sending Price layouts that he would print and mail
to her, she could send them back painted to have him
scan, allowing them continued work together on the
computer, repeating the process until they felt the
work was complete. Using this process also allowed
her to experiment with colors, an element she often
omits.
While Smith again does not elaborate on what the
piece might be about, and while perhaps it should
be enough that she has reanimated a bird for us, the
power of the owl’s upstretched-in-昀氀ight wings and
direct eye contact suggests a connection. By animating
a drawing she created 30 years ago of a dead bird,
the creature is again able to interact with the world.
When considering the vulnerability of birds, it is easy
to translate that vulnerability to humans. The mixed
media work is contemplative, re昀氀ective, very like
Smith. “I found it di昀케cult to be young,” she shares.
“You have to discover yourself and life and what
things mean in your relationship to everything all the
time because you haven’t had so much experience,
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