Kathryn Smith (South Africa)

Kathryn Smith is a South African artist, curator, and researcher. Working at the crossroads between curatorial projects, scholarly research, and studio practices, her art documents uncertainty, risk, and experimentation. Working both in Cape Town and Stellenbosch, her works have been exhibited and collected throughout South Africa as well as all over the globe. In 2006, she was appointed senior lecturer in the Department Of Visual Arts at the University of Stellenbosch and head of the Fine Arts Studio Practice program. She took a sabbatical in 2012/2013 to read for an MSc (Forensic Art) at the University of Dundee, the only Masters program of its kind.

Education

Smith was born in Durban, South Africa in 1975. In 1997 she graduated from Witwatersrand University(Wits) with a Bachelor in Fine Arts in Printmaking. Two years later in 1999 she received her Masters with distinction in Printmaking from Wits University. She sought further education by participating in a wealth of artist residencies in the United States, Canada, Europe, and South Africa. She is currently based in Dundee, Scotland, as a postgraduate student in the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, specialising in forensic art, under the Chevening Award scheme.

Artistic Works and career

While Smith received her degree in Printmaking, the majority of her prints are not traditional in nature. Indeed, Smith views printmaking as the ability to reproduce and repeat images, thinking "of it as a kind of failed forgery; failed as there really was no 'original' to begin with." Characterized as "crime artist and muse", her works are both visceral and uncanny. Her identity as both an artist and historical researcher ultimately led to her preoccupation with forensic methods of observation and perception. As a result, her interests in forensic pathology and psychology lead to mixed media products that are social commentaries as much as they are works of art.

Smith defines herself as simultaneously a performance artist, cultural manipulator of media, and photographer. During her time at the Artist's Press in 2004, she produced a series of collages incorporating visual media, conversations, observations, and sampled words from society. These works challenge the viewer to play the role of a detective by "unraveling clues and references that may not announce themselves outright." For Smith photography, creative and journalistic, theoretical and practical, occupies a central place in her work due to its privileged relationship with verisimilitude and actuality. Focusing on forensic aesthetics, her works stretch modernity and photography combined with the unnerving. She cites her camera-based media as being heavily influenced by film, photography, new media, and theories of law, psychology and psychoanalysis.

Alongside practising fine art Smith is also very involved in curatorial projects. For example, one of her more recent collaborative projects, (with Roger van Wyk) Dada South? Exploring Dada legacies in South African art, 1960 to the present, investigated Dada tendencies in South African art from the past 50 years. This project was displayed in the Iziko South African National Gallery in 2009.

She has been represented by the Goodman Gallery since 2004. In 2009, Smith opened up Serialworks, her apartment studio in the Woodstock neighbourhood in Cape Town, as a project space. Her work can be found publically in the South African National Gallery as well as the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Privately her work is all throughout South Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom, and through Europe.

Solo Exhibitions and Projects

  • 2012: Incident Room: Jacoba ‘Bubbles’ Schroeder, Gallery AOP, Johannesburg, South Africa
  • 2009: In Camera, Fotografins Hus, Stockholm, Sweden
  • 2004-5: Euphemism, National Arts Festival, Grahamstown; Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, Port Elizabeth; Durban Art Gallery, Durban; Johannes Stegmann Art Gallery, University of the OFS, Bloemfontein; South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa
  • 2003: Jack in Johannesburg, as part of 24.7, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg,

South Africa

Group Exhibitions and Projects

  • 2012: 11th Havana Biennale ‘Art Practices and Social Imaginaries’, Havana, Cuba
  • 2010/2011: Noli Procrastinare: Public Art for Laingsburg, Laingsburg, Great Karoo, South Africa
  • 2010: Biennale of Young Art, Mosco, Russia
  • 2009: AiM Biennale, Marrakech, Morocco
  • 2008: Revolutions – Forms that Turn, Sydney, Australia

Publications

  • Conceptualised and edited One Million and Forty-Four Years (and Sixty Three Days), an anthology of current attitudes towards the avant-garde (download available from http://www.serialworks.info/publications.php)
  • Researcher and editor for monographic books Penny Siopis (2005) and Sam Nhlengethwa (2006), published by Goodman Gallery Editions
  • Researcher and author of Barend de Wet (2011), published by SMAC, Stellenbosch

Reviews and Citations

  • South African Art Now (Sue Williamson)
  • 10 Years, 100 Artists (ed. Sophie Perryer)

Organisations

Smith was a founding member of the Trinity Session in 2000 (active in the group until 2004), as well as a founder of The Premises Project Room.

Awards

  • 2012/2013 Chevening scholar
  • 2007: iCommons Summit Artist-in-Residence Scholarship; Croatia
  • 2005: National Arts Council funding Award, South Africa
  • 2003: Ampersand Fellowship, New York City
  • 2004: Business and Arts South Africa project partnership
  • 2003: Standard Bank Young Artist Award for 2004, Johannesburg, South Africa
  • 2002: Inaugural Wits Convocation/Alumni Bright Star Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Arts and Humanities, Johannesburg, South Africa
  • 2001 FNB Vita Art prize nominee, Durban, South Africa
  • 2000 ABSA Atelier Award (finalist), Johannesburg, South Africa
  • 1999 Sasol New Signatures winner, Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, South Africa

Other (general)

As Christian Nerf has observed, "Kathryn Smith's interest in those individuals whose mission it is to control and take lives, to [...] and terrorise others lies in the same place as my interest in organisations and institutions that have that same intent." http://athingforthinga.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Kathryn%20Smith