Exhibition Essay
Another World: The Textile Art of David B. Smith

Exhibition Essay

A world is defined by an invisible code -- a system of assumed relationships that dictate ways of being and acting. With each shift to these rules, a new world is opened, and new possibilities emerge. These worlds may appear open or fixed, natural or synthetic, collaborative or individual, but there are often opportunities between these binaries to move in a myriad of directions. Over the last 7 years, I have developed a photo-textile, world-building practice to undermine these fixed perspectives, and I invite you to immerse yourself in this world with me.

By creating unfamiliar beings and images through the designing of textiles, I embody and envision future and alternate worlds. I blend art history, science fiction, and home craft to suggest that we can both honor and re-conceive our relationship to tradition and reimagine structures and institutions. Another World brings together 20 key pieces and presents them in the order they were made so that you can see how this strategy started, documenting the evolution of my practice in relating to the unknown - one of acceptance, incorporation, and growth.

I start with emotionally resonant photographs from physical and digital life and have them woven into tapestries; then I cut, sew, fold, layer, stuff, upholster, drape, embroider, paint, dye, and otherwise intervene into and in-between the images. By sequencing these actions into code-like scripts, my body acts as a conduit for physically crafting ‘image-objects’, building organic structures in response to the challenges and uncertainty that the future often represents. 

Much of the work exists in the intersectional spaces between identities - where biology, technology, and late stage capitalism impact bodies and how we see each other and ourselves. I am interested in how our concept and knowledge of the self might lead to more satisfying and just societies and am inspired by José Esteban Muńoz's work on queer futurity, Mel Y. Chen's blurring definitions of human and animal, and Michael Talbot's "The Holographic Universe".

In 2013 I made Mario, my first textile work, a jacquard tapestry that abstracts the Nintendo character Super Mario into a mandala-like geometric pattern. When I saw the work on the wall, felt it in my hands, and noticed how the image warped as I moved it, I sensed this place of flux between image and textile would allow me room to play with fixed meanings and see my world and myself in a more fluid way. 

When I played video games in the 1980s, web technologies were beginning to dramatically alter the power structures shaping our lives and the planet, and as a child growing up in this time of flux, I see all societal and psychological issues through this lens, noticing how technologies and the corporations that profit from them are altering our sense of what is possible. My art is a way for me to question this and to team up with others who have intersectional concerns.

Supporting and learning from my community is central to my artmaking and worldbuilding. I want my family, friends and colleagues who range in sexualities, genders, races, nationalities, cultural backgrounds, social classes, and abilities to collectively imagine possibility, and the actions needed to make those visions reality. Through experimentation and research, immersion in impulse and the embodying of physical and internal desires, a photo-digital-textile-based world is organically emerging; one that reflects the mysteries and challenges  of being alive at this time, a space to contemplate, uncover and recover together as we navigate the unknown terrain of our current circumstances.

Creative thinking is invaluable in building our worlds and the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has brought this topic to the forefront. Now is a time for reimagining, for long-term thinking and planning, but also for developing flexible, adaptive models. The pandemic has reminded us that we each hold the power to change the world, and that thinking, feeling, learning and acting, alone and together, has the potential to build another ecosystem, one that is just and healthy and created through radical care.