At its crux, doppelnature is an exploration of the thin line existing between the digital and physical world. Shawn Smith’s starting point is the digital image, which represents a complete and final detachment from “reality,” given its lack of physicality and existence as pure data. In his work, Shawn Smith both examines and reverses this process, transforming the digital back into the physical.

His investigation of vision, image, and perception, winds through many of his scientific interests: morphology, evolution, virology, and astrophysics. Each piece develops from the intersection between the digital and the physical, the perceived and the tangible, the synthetic and the natural, the theoretical and the actual.

Smith’s primary subject is the natural world, but it is a world that for him exists almost entirely virtually. His primary source for research is the digital images of the Google image search. These two-dimensional images are translated into three dimensions through a process that is deliberately laborious and non-automated. A low-resolution image is found on the web and expanded until each of the individual pixels appears as a solid color dot on the grid that forms the image. The pixels, elemental building blocks of any digital image, become actual building blocks, as Smith hand-cuts them from MDF or plywood (the material itself being both organic wood yet a man-made composite). Smith then hand-dyes each piece with hand-mixed colors to develop a rich palette. The completed piece seems to be a pixilated, “synthetic” image, and yet it is unequivocally real, made by tactile hand labor. Smith considers these pieces “doppelnature”: copies of nature that have lost all natural characteristics.

In many of his pieces, Smith explores the ways in which the natural world uses color morphology to create or deflect visual interest, such as in Betta Fish, Green Puff and Alligator. The bird head installation is another example of color morphology, showing the spectrum of resplendence in the avian world, in this case used by the males to attract mates. Lined up on the wall, they simulate a Google search result, the installation referencing the screen: nature on display for humans, called up by a computer query. Other pieces highlight more deadly ways in which humans use animals for their own ends, such as in Arctic Game. In the Trio—Spaghettification, Intersection, and Squish—Smith considers the effects of gravity on a deer head trophy. All three have the same number of pieces, which are elongated or shortened to illustrate phenomena of astrophysics. Two of the pieces, Glitch and Mop Bucket, are explorations of virtual phenomena. Glitch replicates the kind of computer error that leads to color distortion in digital images; while Mop Bucket—the only representation of a completely man-made object in the exhibition—comes from Smith’s observation that the digitally created world of video games is perhaps the most extreme example of society’s embrace of the simulated image. Vicious Venue is a piece that sums up this contradiction between virtual and physical reality.

Shawn Smith’s sculptures ask us to look at the difference between what we perceive and what we can touch, between the nature that exists outside and the doppelnature that we create onscreen. He establishes virtual reality and physical reality not as two separate spheres, but as part of a whole with permeable boundaries. His works offer both the reassurance that we are not losing touch (literally) with reality, while at the same time opening our eyes to exciting new possibilities for experiencing the world.

Text by Jennifer Scanlan, Curator of Art and Design.

Now Contemporary Art
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Miami (FL) 33127 United States
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