About Kasey Smith

Nederlandse versie 🇳🇱

How and why do we commit certain moments to memory and not others?  I am a contemporary multidisciplinary artist using ephemerality and duplication/replication to make art about the mechanics of remembrance. Raised by history buffs who would later become afflicted by memory disorders, from a young age I’ve been facing the tension between what we want to remember and what we cannot remember. My work is a response to that resulting anxiety. Through the memorization strategies of recreation and reinterpretation, I am creating “memento memorare” that remind us to remember to remember. This takes the form of tiny memorials for banal moments; memory palaces to artists time almost forgot; and maps that visualize niche histories overlaid onto the present. But I am not naive. Holding back the tide of forgetting is impossible, which is where my embrace of ephemerality factors into my work. This takes the form of art that is destroyed; art that is lost; and art that is too delicately organic.

For nearly two decades after my graduation from UCSC, I worked in the San Francisco Bay Area making guerrilla art about forgotten local histories and ecosystems. This included a social practice piece about old hand-painted ads; guerrilla art shows about the history of Faberge Eggs, Tiffany stained glass, and parallels with our local ecology; and a series of DIY interactive art events in moving trucks.

In 2022 I moved from California to a small village in North Holland called Uitgeest. Inspired by my immigration journey in the Netherlands, my recent work — called The Guild Of Saint Luke — explores the intersection of collective memory and belonging. This multi-phase series uses Dutch art history and the painter’s guild system as an allegory for cultural integration. It includes my recent works on Johannes Vermeer’s solitary female figures and Rembrandt’s stolen paintings.

Bridging my California and North Holland periods are two ongoing seedbombing series – one about remembrance and Alzheimer's, the other about the cityscape and returning nature to urban space. Both involve meticulously painted renditions of packaging that are designed to be discarded and destroyed as part of the art.

ARTIST CV