Corey Smith is a painter and photographer originally form Portland, OR residing in Los Angeles, CA. His paintings and photography have appeared in Vice, Elle, ID, FHM, Frequency, Complex, and Happy magazines to name a few. His works have been shown in galleries across the country, including Upper Playground (Portland, OR), Versus (Los Angeles), On Six (San Francisco), KCDC (New York City), and the Orange County Museum of Art.
Smith's high-gloss, ultra-flat paintings capture the joys of plasticity and pre-fab environments, celebrity as the ultimate blank canvas, and the absurd hyperboles of leisure. But rather than repackage the manufactured world into an aestheticized form-a la post-Warholian Pop-Smith favors a post-Pop approach that brings into day-glo focus the dark vision at the corner of the spectator's eye. The subject of the paintings then becomes the tension between the works' fatalistic undercurrents and the celebratory aura created by Smith's use of bold color and bright-lined contour. The result is a Death Valley realism, colored by both sunny Californian optimism and premonitions of death.
Smith's photography develops some of the same themes as his paintings-surface, extremity-but abandons ironies for a more intimate perspective. Most of his subjects are close friends or lovers, and Smith documents them at points where excess bleeds either into empathy or its impossibility, and where the romance of abandon intersects with abandonment.
This is awful, deeply wrong, utterly fantastic stuff, a perfect distillation of a time, place, and generation.
Think ya got what it takes to hang on the walls of Ninestar? Prove it. Send an email to
. Include your artistic resume, some sample works, and anything else that'll make us want to meet you.
|