Smith (artist)
Dorothée Smith (born Bogdan D. Smith) is a French artist born in Paris in 1985.
Biography
Smith's career has included a post-graduate degree in Philosophy at the Paris-Sorbonne University, a degree from the French national school of photography of Arles, the Aalto University in Helsinki and then at the National Studio of Contemporary Arts (Le Fresnoy), France. Their work can be seen as an observation of constructions, deconstructions, displacements, and transformations of identity. Photography rubs shoulders with video, hybrid art and the use of new technologies, and has led to collaboration with a research team from the CNRS/IRCICA (French National Centre for Scientific Research) in 2012.[1] Smith recently completed and interactive hybrid installation, implying the implant of an electronic chip inside of their body, allowing the artist to feel the presence of absent bodies - those of the installation in situ visitors.[2]
French photographer and photography specialist Arnaud Claass wrote about her work, in the preface of her first monographic book : "There is no mystery; Dorothée Smith’s approach to the visible, at once luminarist and dark, is valid as an image of the uncertainty of sexual roles. Questions of gender, a current in philosophy over the last twenty years or more, occupy an important place in the intellectual development of her oeuvre. In her world, into which a certain violence occasionally erupts, faces betraying an inexpressible tenderness, a lost look in the eyes, bodies surrendered in a heat-haze of intimacy, the warmth of ice-floes sublimated into breath, deserted horizons –these are polarised like magnetic auroras by the new style of challenge that the modern world hurls at the separation of the sexes. It is more a question of metamorphosis than metaphor.".[3]
Their work is represented by the gallery Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris,[4] and has been exhibited at, amongst other places, Les Rencontres d'Arles, Atelier de Visu, Marseille, Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, or Casino Luxembourg – as well as at photography festivals such as Photo Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Pingyao, China and the Daegu Biennale, South Korea. Dorothée Smith is currently completing a PhD in Philosophy.
Publications
- Löyly, Filigranes Éditions, 2013 ISBN 9782350462967. Text by Dominique Baqué.
- Löyly & Sublimis, Le Château d’Eau Publishing, 2011 ISBN 2919398032. Text by Arnaud Claass.
Solo exhibitions
2009-2012 (Europe/Asia)
- Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki
- Solo Show, Hors-Pistes, Centre Pompidou, Paris
- Rencontres Internationales de Photographie d'Arles [5]
- Galerie les Filles du Calvaire, Paris
- "Photo Phnom Penh", French institute of Cambodia
- Encontros da Imagem, Braga
- Le château d’eau, pôle photographique de Toulouse, Toulouse
- Dask gallery, Copenhague
- Chapelle de la maternité Sainte Croix, Metz
- AnnexOne Gallery, Copenhague
Selected Works
- 2009 Löyly, series of photographs
- 2010 Sub Limis, series of photographs
- 2011 C19H28O2 (Agnès), video installation [6]
- 2012 Cellulairement, interactive installation [7]