Kiki smith bio
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Kiki Smith
Artist Bio
When conceptual and minimalist art was at its height, Kiki Smith unapologetically made work related to bodily presence and sensual, subjective knowledge of nature and emotion. Deciding against the heavy, industrial materials of sculptors like Donald Judd, Richard Serra, or her father, Tony Smith, Smith uses ephemeral materials such as paper, wax, glass, and ceramics. Often her sculptures employ the abject, castoffs from the body that seem to occupy a strange middle ground between life and death, objects like fluid and severed limbs that have left the body but are somehow “missed.”
Smith’s art resists both modern and classical notions of beauty, trading in the easily fetishized exterior of the body for the interior, exposing the inner life of the flesh. Often, Smith draws upon themes of death, sexuality, and vulnerability in her work with the concept of the feminine at its heart. Later in her career, Smith explored famous women of history, from Lilith to the Virgin Mary to Little Red Riding Hood, in continuation of her refashioning of typical representations of women in myth and literature.
Untitled (Red Man), , is a body made of Gampi paper covered in blood red ink. Hanging lifeless on the wall, the body is removed from its f
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Kiki Smith approached her residency at FWM as an opportunity to explore a traditional textile form, the blanket. Drawing on the well-established tradition of American weaving on Jacquard looms, Smith designed a wool coverlet, which FWM fabricated in conjunction with a small weaving company in western Pennsylvania. The Jacquard loom produced a double-woven blanket in which the imagery and colors pictured on the front are seen in reverse on the back. After weaving, the blankets were put through a fulling mill—an industrial device equipped with hundreds of needles that grab and fluff the fibers—to soften the coverlets and slightly blur the imagery.
Titled Familiars, Smith’s coverlet depicts a benevolent scene of a woman surrounded by a menagerie of animals with snowflakes or stars dotting the sky above. Reminiscent of a fable, the scene is repeated twice on the blanket—a technical limitation of the weaving process that was used by Smith to accentuate the reflective nature of the text woven above the women and their flocks. “I see the moon, and the moon sees me” are the words from a nursery rhyme. The idea of reflection, or doubling, also highlights a fable’s inherent “function” as a mirror image of behavior, from which one can learn something new. The word “Familiar” is woven
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Summary of Kiki Smith
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Accomplishments
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