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John Smither

John Smither(John Smither)(@jsmither)

Premier
Seattle, WA

ohn Smither is originally from the Chicago area and grew up in the Midwest with an MFA in printmaking from Washington Univ. in St. Louis. Once out of school he moved back to Chicago where he continued to make relief prints, video, and large-scale drawings. His subjects focused on the urban and wild landscapes of the area. After showing in Chicago at solo and group events for many years he moved to Seattle. In Seattle, he continued to work on drawings, paintings and developed a new way of creating mixed media video installations based on the local environment of the Pacific Northwest. His work is included in numerous private and public collections. John's studio is in Seattle, Washington’s Georgetown Equinox complex and is open for visits every second Saturday of the month and by appointment.

Artistic Categories

Genres

Film VideographyMixed MediaPainting

Mediums

DigitalInkOil

Styles

Surrealism

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2
Galleries

Artist Statement

My work focuses on the remembrance of intimate personal experiences of natural environments. For most of my career I have focused on forest and wild urban settings. I grab bits and pieces of recollections and construct assemblages of imagery to create an abstract natural scene. As such, the final product is not a rendering of a place but rather a scattered recollection which mimics how we recall a place and time. I mix hard edges, softened shapes, negative space, gestures and lines to pull the viewer’s eye across the surface. This lets them join me in creating their own scattered recollection. Since moving to Seattle I have concentrated on depicting the native flora of the PNW in my particular surreal style. For the multimedia works which I am submitting, I typically start with footage of a wilderness location (rural or urban) and build around it a piece that intends to capture how a memory returns to us in glimpses and half recollections. I focus on personal and informal scenes which are often at the heart of a memory of place. I use different media to suggest abstractions of the memory. The abstraction increases as our eyes move from video to painting and sometimes to woodcut and then to overlays of the 2d imagery back upon the video. I also utilize enhanced ambient location audio as a “binder” of the experience. I package all of this into a unified immersive experience as an alter to that memory.

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