Smith is an artist and researcher who blurs genders, disciplines and forms and offers curious works in the etymological sense of cura: curiosity and care about the world around us, from land to sky, from human beings to more-than-human beings, from the visible to the invisible. Photography, video, performance and sculpture, as well as thermal imaging cameras, neon lights, hybrids, mutations and an exploration of other states of consciousness come together in a fluid work of art that incorporates cosmic dimensions from dreams and beyond.
With Dami, Smith is pursuing his artistic and metaphysical quest through spiritual techniques (cognitive trance, meditation and Amazonian medicine), interstitial bodily states (gender transitioning and the experience of weightlessness), voluntary hybridisation (skin implantation of extraterrestrial or electronic material) and collaboration with artificial and animal intelligence – in order to describe, differently, our relationship with otherness, the beyond and all that runs through us, escapes us and outlives us. Trance and transcendence join forces in this experimental work that explores other states of the body and other states of consciousness. ‘Transition’, ‘passage’ and ‘transit’ are vital in the creative process.
Smith’s interdisciplinary projects are always introduced with photographic prologues – his original language. For his first exhibition at Galerie Christophe Gaillard in Paris, the artist is presenting the beginnings of Dami in the form of three original photographic series: Les maîtresses, Travelogue and Fulmen, as well as extracts from Signes and Photino.
This new project-world takes its name from the vocabulary of the Panoan-language peoples of Amazonia: the word dami denotes the visions of astonishing metamorphic figures that appear upon drinking Ayahuasca, a decoction that is central to Amazonian medicine. The visionary apparition of dami symbolises an encounter between the spirit of creepers and, by extension, the spirit of the forest and the world. In Brazilian Amazonia, dami is also a variant of the pronunciation of daime, which means ‘gift of God’. This etymological meaning corresponds to the artist’s first name, so it forms a starting point for this project that is at once autobiographical and psychogeographical. With this perspective, exploring a place is the same as exploring oneself because each space is always inhabited by our own ghosts. ‘Experience proves that deviation is a good replacement for Mass, offering a more effective way to communicate with all energies’ (Chtcheglov, Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau, 1958).
Smith was first known for his portraits, but he now focuses on landscapes, which he approaches as if they were an alternative form of portraits. His new photographs are part of interstitial spaces populated with non-human entities and with diffuse, vast, ecstatic, ancestral and disembodied energies, which he sees as portals that invite a shift of gaze: the Médoc, Peruvian Amazonia, the deserts of California, Arizona and Nevada, and Bardsey Island in Wales. By combining use of photography, thermography, creation in a non-ordinary state of consciousness and the crossing of metamorphic landscapes, these images seek to reveal another way to relate to landscapes, disrupting the order of things to establish ‘the cosmic vision [...] as political thought’ (Édouard Glissant, Philosophie de la relation, 2009). Dami continues the approach that Smith began with Désidération, illustrating new attitudes to adopt in our world of disaster in order to envisage desirable futures:
‘Wide open here’, the only method, in my view, that makes it possible to relate to transcendence: [...] to turn to that which goes beyond all things. Wide open here: that is the world henceforth, that is our world.
- Jean-Luc Nancy in L’adoration (Galilée, 2010).
