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We’ve seen the future, and it only looks good in hardware specs. Amid famine, collapse, and massacre, we dream of freedom. From the pyramid to the moon shuttle, man’s greatest endeavor has always been to subjugate death and the dreams of sleep—to own them, control them, escape therm—to paint our own new futures onto the blank slate of unfilled coordinates.
In obsolete dreams, artist Corey Smith confronts the hulking physicality of these useless masters of dreams and death: cold-war stealth bombers, moon shuttles, astronauts, the unholy engine fueled by the american flag. But smith remakes them according to their own dream logic, that alien symbolism of deflective curve and angle that is both perfect and perfectly incomprehensible to the life that is always right here in front of us.
So in smith’s work, silent death comes in the bright colors of advertising, and bombers swing lovely as children’s models on wires. The grim, grey haze of a satellite photo takes on a more intense reality than the one you know, because it comes from that high, floating future. Even if the art of science is war and escape, there’s nothing more romantic than chasing the zero all the way down. And space is where you dream, when you dream on empty.
Corey Smith’s obsolete dreams calls out to the primal dreams themselves: long live the dead dreams, long after their masters have forgotten how to dream.
-mathew korfhage 2009
Bio by Mathew Korfhage:
Corey Smith is a painter, sculptor and photographer from portland, or, who currently resides in los angeles, ca. His paintings and photography have appeared in vice, elle, id, fhm, frequency, complex, and arkade magazines, among others. His works have been shown in galleries across the country, including upper playground (portland, or), versus (los angeles), on six (san francisco), kcdc (new york city), and the orange county museum of art.
Smith’s high-gloss, ultra-flat paintings capture the joys of plasticity and pre-fab environments, celebrity as the ultimate blank canvas, and the absurd hyperboles of modern leisure. But rather than repackage the manufactured world into an aestheticized form–a la post-warholian pop–smith favors a post-pop approach that brings into day-glo focus the dark vision at the corner of the spectator’s eye. The paintings find their subject in the tension between the works’ fatalistic undercurrents and the celebratory aura created by smith’s use of bold color and bright-lined contour.
His sculptures and mixed media works develop some of these same themes, but rather than map plasticity onto flat canvas, smith instead maps flatness onto plastic forms–whether by painting across arrays of commercially molded objects or by making use of the naturally deflective precision-cut panes of modern machinery.
Smith’s photography develops some of the same themes as his sculpture and painting–surface, extremity–but abandons ironies for a more intimate perspective. Most of his subjects are close friends or lovers, and smith documents them at points where excess bleeds either into empathy or its impossibility, and where the romance of abandon intersects with abandonment.
His works are a death valley realism, infused with both sunny californian optimism and morbid premonition. This is awful, deeply wrong, utterly fantastical stuff–a distillation of a time, a place, and a generation that are always already beside themselves.
Websites:
www.highpoweredstreetdrugs.com
SHOW HISTORY:
Solo exhibitions
2010
Worksound gallery, “obsolete dreams”, portland, or
2009
Backspace gallery, “air superiority and obsolete dreams”, portland, or
2008
Light gallery, “fuck yeah bro!”, costa mesa, ca backspace gallery, “drop out, not bombs”, portland, or fice, “jesus i trust in you”, salt lake city, ut.
2007
Mark wooley gallery,”affair at the jupiter hotel”, portland, or the closet, “liar’s laughter”, santa monica, ca
2006
Backspace gallery, “it’s not gay if it’s for drugs”, portland, or sugar gallery, “seven day weekend”, portland, or the camp gallery, “key to the city”. Costa mesa, ca rake art gallery, “ultra artsy”, portland, or seven gallery, “let the good times roll”, portland, or
2005
Neverender gallery, “zerocharisma”, reno, nv circle gallery, “zerocharisma”, salt lake city, ut nemo design, “looking good is better than feeling good”, portland, or backspace gallery, “zerocharisma”, portland, or
2004
Street machine gallery, “nice life”, san diego, ca backspace gallery, “nice life”, portland, or
2003
Kcdc gallery, “nice life”, williamsburg, ny
Group exhibitions
2010
Heist gallery, “we haven’t felt this way in years ii”, san francisco, ca ghettogloss gallery, “furious sons”, los angeles, ca
2009
Work sound gallery, “white noise”, portland, or
2008
Regent theatre, “clean hands, dirty hands”, downtown los angeles, ca world of wonder gallery, “departed”, hollywood, ca
2007
Audiocinema gallery, “children of the revolution”, portland, or
Rake gallery, “all day snacking”, portland, or
2006
Upper playground fifty 24pdx gallery, “new scenery”, portland, or disjecta, “auction 2006″, portland, or maek gallery, “down to earth”, encinitas, ca renowned gallery, “it’s all wood”, portland, or on six gallery, “carpe diem”, san francisco, ca rake gallery, “opening”, portland, or versus gallery, “clash of the titans”, los angeles, ca higgins gallery, pnca, “animals, the real and fantastic”, portland, or wonder gallery/ mark wooley, “sedition”, portland, or
2005
Orange county museum of art, “modis odis”, new port, ca
2003
Mailroom gallery, “Corey Smith and nemo design”, portland, or
Non profit
2005
“people and places” group photography show, benefit for habitat for humanity and architecture for humanity
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