Kasey Smith
Q4 featured artist
Kasey Smith is a multidisciplinary artist making ephemeral art about memory, history, and place. Her work leans heavily on craft traditions and the tension between high and low brow art forms. Her pockets are full of pebbles and twigs, her backpack holds at least one art book at all times, and while she loves maps, she cannot read them to save her life. These three facts are indispensable to understanding the influences on her work.
After studying installation art at the University of California in Santa Cruz, she spent two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area making guerrilla art about local history and ecology. This included a social practice piece about historic hand painted ads; guerrilla art shows about Faberge Eggs, Tiffany stained glass, and their interrelationships with the local ecology; and a series of DIY interactive art events in moving trucks. In 2022 she moved to the Netherlands where she is continuing her explorations on memory and place through a seven-part creative deep dive on the history of the Dutch masters.
Studio Practice
How do you make art about a place you don’t know? The answer is you learn. Which is why after moving to the Netherlands in 2022 my practice has centered on a “conceptual apprenticeship” under the greats of Dutch art. Modelled after an actual painting apprenticeship, I am two years into this seven year project of studying the works and styles of Dutch painters such as Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Heironymous Bosch. By researching why, how, and what they painted, I am gaining a better understanding of what it means to make art within the art historical tradition of the Netherlands.
Inspiration
The first year of my immigration journey I felt pretty isolated and lonely. I knew I wanted to start my “apprenticeship” with Vermeer, but I wasn’t sure how to approach his work or what story I wanted to tell with it. So I just started reading everything I could, hoping that inspiration would strike. When I read Lawrence Gowing’s writings on the solitary female figure in Vermeer’s work I knew I had my inspiration. He called these paintings the “pearl pictures” because of how beautiful and self-contained they were, which is why I’ve recreated them here using dyed freshwater pearls. And while Gowing only considered six paintings to be “official” pearl pictures, I ended up rendering fourteen of Vermeer’s paintings this way. The process of choosing and pinning these thousands of pearls has been a useful meditation on solitude and my immigration experience in the Netherlands. One which allowed me to process a lot of feelings and enter my second year feeling lighter and more grounded.
Challenges
I got stuck on these pearl Vermeer pieces a lot. I was waiting for canvases from England and pearls from China; pieces fell off the wall and I was too traumatized to immediately redo them; and often the pixelization just wouldn’t work like I wanted and I had to step away. Whenever this happened, I would work on these vaguely silly Vermeer-themed wearables instead. I made long fake nails inspired by Woman With A Balance. I made a battle jacket full of embroidered patches based on Woman Reading A Letter At An Open Window. And my favorite – I carved a combination clog and Croc and decorated it (including the jibbitz) like A Maid Alseep. While not the most important pieces in my portfolio, they were a great emotional safety valve and I absolutely wear them to my art openings.
For every piece I make, there are often dozens of experiments that never make it onto my portfolio. For my Vermeer pieces, I did a lot of experiments using Girl With A Pearl Earring. She’s just so iconic, so it was really easy to see in her face if a material or a technique was working. One of these days I should drag them all out and photograph them, really lay bare my thought process while refining this series. I still love some of these Girl With A Pearl Earring pieces. And looking at them I can still feel the spirit of exploration and learning that I approached them with.
Reflection
