Believe You Me examines the manner in which books and book imagery continue to deliver status, even in a culture that has turned away from reading—indeed even more powerfully, and more pervasively, than in eras that had not yet given up on the book as a storehouse of knowledge and wisdom. In these contemporary images, books have become vacant props, drafted into private battles and culture wars out of a desperate nostalgia for the fading power of the written word.
"A popular government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives." – James Madison
The Forever Govern Ignorance series documents microfiche preserved in Federal Depository Libraries across the United States. Stacks of microfiche cards containing countless government records are first photographed and then pulled from their files to reveal a wide array of topics housed within the thin sheets of film.
Volume
Volume documents bound periodicals and journals in public libraries. A number of titles photographed for the project have been destroyed. Many have been replaced by online counterparts. Hunting for and photographing these objects is central to the creative process. The books and words are not touched, artificially lit, or manipulated – rather created by the librarian, found in the stacks, and positioned by the last anonymous reader. The focus is on simple, provocative titles that transcend the spines on which they appear to create conceptual, language-based, anthropological works.
Collocation (noun) defined as:
1 the action or result of placing or arranging together. Specifically: a noticeable arrangement or conjoining of linguistic elements (as words).
2 placing things side by side or in position: the collocation of the two pieces.
Collocation No.13 (NATURE), is an installation work commissioned for the University of Florida’s Biomedical Sciences Building. It was selected as one of 40 outstanding public art projects to receive national recognition by the Public Art Network’s 2010 Year in Review. Smith worked with art glass fabricator Franz Mayer of Munich to create the 14 art glass panels, each measuring 40 by 60 inches. The images were printed digitally with transparent ceramic melting colors onto the rear surface of each art glass panel, the colors fired to the glass, and the text engraved then filled with lacquer.