Rosalie Smith

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

My practice is guided by speculative, self-authored science fiction narratives that form the conceptual and architectural framework of my sculptures. These works imagine a post-human world where the 99% of us have devolved into fleshy growths upon piles of technological debris—after the 1% have jetted off to Mars. I aim to depict an unsexy singularity between humans and technology: microplastics turned macroplastics, an old phone receiver grafted into skin. Each sculpture embodies the pervasiveness of waste within our contemporary landscape, reflecting both its excess and its strange, persistent vitality. With an absurdist tilt, I construct assemblage “gadgets” and vehicles as survival tools for navigating ecological crisis. I think of an artist as a kind of digestive tract—hungrily consuming the visual and material world, breaking it down, and reconstituting it into new form. The stages of digestion—ingestion, breakdown, absorption, assimilation—mirror the creative process. We encounter and internalize the world, deconstruct its parts, absorb meaning, and finally, excrete it back as something transformed. My practice takes this process literally. As a found object artist, I assemble and transfigure discarded materials en masse, translating the excesses of contemporary life into a new kind of body. My collection process is deliberately passive. I rarely seek materials out; instead, they appear to me in the flow of daily life—on walks with my dog, during commutes, or while...

Artwork