REVIEWS
"In The Great Gatsby, a drunk partier in Gatsby’s library is impressed not only with the man’s tasteful collection of books, but by the fact that Gatsby hasn’t even pretended to open them. The books exist purely as a symbol of wealth, success, and erudition. Mickey Smith's show at Invisible-Exports is about these kinds of books, books that don’t exist to be read but to lend their aura to the proceedings around them, from presidential addresses to pornos.
Smith plays with the way people use a loaded bookshelf to say something about themselves in a series of images rephotographed from computer screens. Bill Clinton insists that he has not had sexual relations with that woman, cropped to emphasize the library behind him. Donald Rumsfeld’s hairline meets a bookshelf stocked full of the wisdom. A porn star’s bare legs stand in front of a library of dog-eared family tomes and children’s books. The photographs are a focal point for surveying the mileage we get out of books as symbolic objects.
This show isn’t just about the way individuals bolster themselves with a stack of books. Smith’s tool of choice is photography, and she’s also taking apart the photographic convention of a bookshelf, at its most extreme in the vinyl backdrops that photographers use for taking portraits. Smith has produced her own distorted version of these vinyl backdrops for the gallery, and one of the rephotographed images is Ted Kaczynski’s wedding portrait with a similar fake bookshelf backdrop (all the more potent knowing that the FBI would later use Kaczynski’s library records to track him down).
However, the books shelved directly onto the gallery floor are the real thing, as if the space is a library turned on its side. Visitors walk on a floor of book spines, a series of bound court documents donated by a library that would prefer to remain anonymous. The floor of books invites a visceral experience of the aura we invest in books; Smith told me that the responses to walking on the books ranged from trepidation to ebullience.
The rephotographed computer screens of the front room emphasize that contemporary research tools of choice tend to be digital; the court documents shelved in the front room are the victims of digital record-keeping. In the back room, Smith has reproduced notable portraits from the New York Public Library’s photography collection, including Albert Einstein, Fred Astaire, and Hellen Keller, all posing with books. These portraits give a brief back-history to the contemporary conventions up for display (and critique) in front. Throughout, Smith uses photography as a tool of analysis, picking out a piece of our culture and finding, in turns, absurdity and humor, horror, and the strange history of a symbol, from Astaire and Gatsby to Clinton and Kaczynski."
– Jarrett Moran, Artlog, 2011
"In previous bodies of work, the Minnesota- and New York-based Smith has used books as the subject of her photographs. For the series Volume: Collocations (2009), she photographed the spines of bound volumes of magazines such as Life and Time. The wear and tear on the spines of these tomes seems appropriate for books labelled ‘time’ or ‘life’, but there is also a poignancy to these images. Although these periodicals have seen better days, Smith reproduces them at a large scale; they tower over viewers, reminding us that once words are printed on a page, they carry with them a certain authority.
At least, that is our assumption, and the notion that books convey an air of authority and authenticity to those surrounded by them is examined in this exhibition, Believe You Me. In three series of found or appropriated images, Smith examines how books have been used to convey human ambition and aspirations. Among the images taken from the Internet is Reading List for America, which pictures Osama bin Laden – the top of his head cropped off along the upper edge of the photograph – standing before tall shelves of elaborately bound, encyclopedic-looking volumes. That Woman pictures former U.S. President Bill Clinton during his “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” press conference; the shelf of blue books behind him conveying a sense of credibility that, in the end, proved untrue, while an image of the top of Donald Rumsfeld’s head framed by a wall of books tells a similar story. In a less politically charged screen-grab, a googly-eyed Cookie Monster hosts an episode of Monsterpiece Theatre on Sesame Street, sitting in a comfy chair surrounded by a library of old books. A second suite of re-photographed vintage portraits – mom, dad and the kids, or happy couples, posing before painted backdrops of bookshelves – speak to middle-class dreams of upward mobility.
To view these images, visitors to the gallery had to step up onto a platform of books built in the middle of the gallery floor. By doing so, we are prompted to think about our changing relationship to books. As we stand on these books, which turn out to be bound copies of legal journals, we realize that although the content of these books is meant to promote fairness and social order, we are, literally, walking all over the law.
The final series of images in the back of the gallery were found by the artist in the New York Public Library’s picture collection, and feature cultural luminaries such as Helen Keller, Martin Luther King, Sylvia Plath and Albert Einstein in staged portraits before walls of books. Here, there seems to be a subtle exchange of power between these figures and the shelves of books in the backgrounds. One wonders if shelves lined with e-readers will have the same effect in the future."
– Bill Clarke, Magenta Magazine, 2010
"Mickey Smith is a young photographer making intriguing, discursive images. “You People” presents Smith’s pictures of the spines of volumes of bound journals and magazines on library shelves — “BLOOD,” “MONEY,” and “EBONY” are a few fascinating examples — and leaves us to ponder the virtual communities for whom these journals are intended. That people should continue to bind and shelve journals at all in our digital age adds further poignancy to Smith’s subjects."
– Robert Ayers, ARTINFO November Editor's Picks, 2008
"Everything about her—how she approaches her work, makes it and presents it—is meticulous,” Bekman says. “There’s lots of attention to detail, but it’s also not mechanical. And above all, her work is really stunning."
– Jen Bekman, 20x200.com & Jen Bekman for PDNedu One 2 Watch, 2008
"The bound volumes of periodicals featured in Mickey Smith's photographs loom up at us as gargantuan props in a bibliographic episode of The Twilight Zone. Not only are we confronted with hugely oversized material (well beyond even the largest shelved works at the library, the quartos and such), we also must confront the socio-linguistic implications of the spine labels. "LIFE" is a battered, marked-up, multi-color experience, while "ENDEAVOUR" is an imprecise, though correctable, command, bracketed by choice ("OR") and finality ("END"). (Isn't life like that, too?) Smith's subject matter is found in situ, un-tampered with, and entirely quotidian, yet she reveals and discovers new meanings in astounding confluences of library order and cultural chaos."
– George Slade, Artistic Director, Minnesota Center for Photography and Program Director MCP/McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowships for Photographers, 2007
"Smith’s ongoing project parallels a researcher’s pursuit to find the right book in the stacks. Her quest is to document these reservoirs of information in their concrete physical form, before they disappear completely to exist only in cyberspace. These images underscore the irony that these books, once revered as the ultimate containers of the thoughts and ideas of so many, will soon be available only to those with the electronic capability to access them.
Smith works in series, which she appropriately calls Collocations, creating single images, diptychs and triptychs. With the McKnight exhibition she has expanded her reach with a work titled Collocation No. 4 (TODAY), a mural-scaled work comprising 50 images of grey and yellow journals titled TODAY and TOMORROW installed, unframed, in a grid format. Given the prominence of monumental photographs in the last decade by likes of Andreas Gursky and others, it is not surprising to see Smith experiment. Scale has its own power and Smith has exploited it effectively. Viewing her individual images, we are Lilliputians, looking at books that are four and five feet tall. With Collocation No. 4, Smith has constructed a more realistic, physical relationship between viewer and books; it is as if we are in amongst the stacks, ourselves."
– Mason Riddle, Arts Critic, mnartists.org, 2007
"Mickey Smith explores history, knowledge, and a sense of place in her subtly evocative photographs of book spines. On timeless shelves the imprinted words float, connect, and repeat. These titles, omnipotent and authoritative, appear nostalgic and surprisingly fragile and threatened. The subject headings refer to the universal human experience while the context remains deeply rooted in the American, and specifically Mid-Western, sensibility. Smith's delicate and insightful images deliver a decidedly moving and forceful statement about power, life, and human connections."
– Kati Toivanen, Art & Art History Department at UMKC, 2006
"Mickey Smith does what artists do. She finds beauty where no one has perceived it before... Her photography gives us an entirely new way to look at our familiar world."
– Patrick Coleman, Acquisition Librarian, Minnesota Historical Society, 2005
"Presented lovingly by Smith with nostalgia and an archeological eye for detail - as though she were recording an activity from an age gone by - through this work we are reminded of the speed of our rapidly changing world as we lose contact with tangible objects, and library collections and monetary transactions become transformed into digitized signals."
– Gulgun Kayim, Visible Fringe Director, 2005