1. Shawn Smith
Shawn Smith was born in 1972 in Dallas, TX where he attended Arts Magnet High School and Brookhaven
College before graduating from Washington University in St. Louis, MO with a BFA in Printmaking in
1995. Shawn received his MFA in Sculpture from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2005. He
has received artist-in-residencies from the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA and the Cite Internationale des Arts
in Paris, France.
His work investigates the slippery intersection between the digital world and reality. Specifically, he is interested
in how we experience nature through technology. When we see images of nature on TV or on a computer
screen, we feel that we are seeing nature but we are really only seeing patterns of pixelated light.
Shawn starts with a full sheet of material like plywood or MDF and cut it into 1/2" strips of varying lengths-typically 1/2" to 2' long. He then hand dye each strip of wood individually with dyes mixed from ink and acrylic
paint. He mixes each colour by hand to create a huge palette of colours in order to give the sculpture more depth
and visual interest before assembling the object.
Birds
Spider