Mark R. Smith: Facebook AIR Program
Portals and Rabbit Holes, Work-in-progress, Mark R. Smith for Facebook AIR, 2020
Schematic Drawing, Right Elevator Wall, Mark R. Smith for Facebook AIR, 2020
Schematic Drawing, Right Elevator Wall, Mark R. Smith for Facebook AIR, 2020
For his upcoming Facebook Artist In Residence program, Mark R. Smith is working on an installation titled Portals and Rabbit Holes. As the title suggests, the artist is considering how internet access and social media use can open up dramatic possibilities (portals, but it can also lead to nothing (rabbit holes). The site at Facebook's Arbor facility (Seattle, WA) represents an intriguing challenge because of its large scale and centrally located elevator doors, which requires the art to engage predominantly with the spaces in the margins. To respond to this challenge, Smith is creating de-centralized compositions that will unify the walls and acknowledge the elevator door function as a portal through which people physically enter and disappear.
A base of highly tactile felt fabric soaked in a transparent painting medium will cover each wall to accentuate its topographical qualities and to establish the distinct sensation of a physical landscape. Smith will use striped, recycled clothing to construct concentric forms and geometric compositions to create points of entry or departure. The designs on opposite sides will imply a telescoping effect, with one wall featuring miniaturization and the other a maximization of space. On the right, there will be a map, a network of pathways connecting square units of concentric stripes, each terminating in a tiny rectangular nucleus. The left wall will feature those nuclei enlarged. The installation will create an exponential type of repetition, essentially weighing mass against minutiae.
The project will serve as a metaphorical map inviting viewers to travel into these works and follow a circuitous pathway connecting with abstract collective communities. As in modernist philosophy, there is a utopian yearning behind this work, a sense that abstract geometry attempts to harmonize a disjunctive world.