AABBCCDV
Erik Smith‘s recent work focuses on urban sites and the landscape, developing a line of research between mediums and strategies. In a project realized last fall in Berlin, where he has lived and worked since 2003, Smith slowly excavated a section of the former “dead zone” of the Berlin Wall, digging with a shovel, and unearthed a large spiral staircase which served as a kind of found/revealed public sculpture. Smith brings this line of investigation to his residency in Miami, turning his attention toward transitional or disused sites and the processes remaking them.
Serving as the point of departure for AABBCCDV is the imminent demolition of the building that was home to Dimensions Variable since its inception, and which functioned both as an exhibition venue as well as studio space for its organizers. Located in a part of the city that has seen significant growth in commercial traffic over the past decade, and recently vacated to make way for new development, the soon-to-be-demolished structure can be read as a marker for urban transformations in general, a process that is as much about speculative growth and renewal as it is negation and fragmentation.
Erik Smith
Erik Smith (US) studied comparative literature and art in the US and Italy and has lived and worked in Berlin, Germany since 2003. Selected solo exhibitions include Test Dig No. 1, Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, Berlin (2011), The Ghost of James Lee Byars Calling, de Appel Center for Contemporary Art, Amsterdam (NL) (2007), and New Conceptual Sculpture, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA (1999). His work has also been shown in numerous group exhibitions including Black Mirror, Arsenic, Lausanne (CH) (2010), In Practice Projects, Sculpture Center, LIC, NY (2008), and Redistribution of the Sensible, Magnus Müller Gallery, Berlin (2005). Smith is a 2012 visiting resident at LegalArt.
