Summer V

Kiki Smith brings together collage, drypoint (similar to etching), and digital photography in her series of six works, “Summer.”

Smith’s process begins with a digital photograph of a waterfall. Using small printouts of enlarged sections of the photo, she tapes the sections together to make a larger image. She then lays a sheet of plexiglass onto the collage and finely and selectively scrapes into the plexi to create marks primarily where the water is “moving.” The collaged photo and the plexi are then each scanned, layered together digitally, and printed as a unified image.

The final work alternates between revealing and eroding the legibility and importance of the image’s individual elements. While the resolution of the photographic imagery of the waterfalls is low, the imagery of the tape holding the collages together is clear and defined. In addition, the scraped marks are not only particular and gestural, but they hover in a space in, on, and above the pixelated imagery. The work challenges our perception of depth, space, and time, as well as our judgement of high and low. It also provides celebratory opportunities to question how we see and understand both our environment and visual depictions thereof.