Georgia b Smith

Lives and works in NY, USA

Artist statement

I am preoccupied with the bonds, borders, and disjunctions between human bodies, the built and grown environment, and the surfaces of technology. I want to bring to the fore the ways that environment and subject can be explored as reversible texts, each generating, manipulating, and relationally defining the other. By probing the ambiguous qualities of our discrete physicality, I can test the sense of privileged separateness that divides beings from things, subjects from environments, and individuals from each other. In conceiving my work, we are particularly indebted to theorists Jane Bennett and Donna Haraway. Bennett’s work brought to our attention the concept of vital materialism—which is an interpretative frame for seeking out unaccounted forms of agency in the built and seemingly inanimate environment. I sympathize with Haraway’s critique of anthropocentric models of relation, proposing that we attempt to discern forms of intelligence that are alien to our own.

Artwork