Margaret-Anne Smith

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

As a conceptual and abstract artist, I am interested in iteration and transformation, process and content. Moving between two and three-dimensions, I use sculpture, photography, drawing and painting to investigate shape, surface and material interaction. Working with micro-plywood, rocks, photographic prints and enamel paint, I revise elements across multiple formats to explore how perception shifts through arrangement, documentation and scale. Photography is central to my process as a way of organizing and studying my work, sometimes transforming it into something new. Sculptural elements, made from sharp-edged Baltic birch micro-plywood are photographed from the same viewpoint, offering multiple perspectives, as I rotate each piece of work at precise intervals around its own axis. On the resulting prints, I emphasize flattened and foreshortened qualities with black, or alter the environment in which a sculpture was photographed by the addition of enamel paint to the background. Enamel has its own unpredictable qualities - it can be as smooth as glass or wrinkled into vermiculated textures, echoing geologic forms or the grain of wood. A group of paintings may derive from technical plans for sculpture, resized and re-oriented. In this practice of ongoing, cyclical enquiry, I sculpt, photograph, paint, analyze and return to the same forms, calculating if a small work can structurally tolerate a large increase in scale, or will following an outline with nylon thread on...

Artwork