Artist and researcher born in 1985, SMITH navigates between photography, moving images, installation, sculpture, and performance. His work is organized into open cycles, often initiated by photography. He dismantles all chronology, shifts the boundaries between portrait and landscape, and opens a space where the human, animal, plant, mineral, and celestial realms intertwine. His work is permeated by a poetics of metamorphosis, which transcends the realm of the real, explores the spaces in between, and inhabits thresholds rather than certainties. Forms slip, identities shift, bodies transform, and perception changes. From fluctuating states of consciousness, ranging from trance to psychedelics, SMITH weaves a network of correspondences between bodily and cognitive practices and experimental scientific and technological devices, searching for a point of contact where spirituality, sensitivity, and technology are recomposed.
At MAC VAL, works by the artist were featured in the group exhibitions "Lines of Life - An Exhibition of Legends" in 2019 and "True Stories" in 2023.
The exhibition design was conceived in collaboration with architects and designers Matthieu Prat (Diplomates) and Sami Rintala, assisted by Toni Lozano. The monograph "Wide Open Here" brings together both past and present works in a sweeping gesture that reveals the artist's output in light of his current and future explorations.
A catalogue accompanies this retrospective, co-published with PALAIS BOOKS, with contributions from Taous R. Dahmani, Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo, Florian Gaité, Edward Shanken, Eva Barois de Caevel, Lucien Raphmaj, and Marie NDiaye.
Exhibition produced in collaboration with and with the support of Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris.
With the support of PICTO and AM Art.
This project has been awarded the Bicentennial of Photography label by the Ministry of Culture and is part of the official Bicentennial program from September 1, 2026 to September 30, 2027.
General Curator
Nicolas Surlapierre
Exhibition Curator
Frank Lamy, assisted by Julien Blanpied
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