No Absolutes
Contemporary Art from the Region
October 8, 2000 - January 7, 2001
Catalogue Essay - Craig Smith
Craig Smith
Craig Smith is showing two series, both using images of water. One
is a series of waves; the other, of icebergs. Unlike Gutiérrez, who opened
the aperture to let motion take over in many of the Chile photographs,
Craig Smith arrests the flux and the power of the wave. What he is interested
in is form. The shapes that the water takes can be examined only because
he captures them in stills. Of course, this process has an embedded irony
too, since as Heraclitus would like us to remember, everything is in flux
and the motion of waves is a powerful metaphor for that process.
The icebergs are, in Smith’s elegant photographs, an architecture made by geologic events. The scale makes them seem eternal, yet they too are in the process of disintegration. They are old, remnants of the deep past. They are familiar - everyone knows what an iceberg is - yet exotic, and each is unique.
The work offers beauty as the antidote. The two series contrast the ephemeral in the life of a wave with the endurance of water frozen - if not forever - at least for a very, very long time. Longer than our own lifetimes.
Marilyn A. Zeitlin
Director/Chief Curator
Arizona State University Art Museum
Return to the No Absolutes exhibition
For more information contact John Spiak at spiak@asu.edu.
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