DANI SMITH STUDIO
Quotidian Conjurings
Quotidian Conjurings converges conceptual portraiture with Black feminist themes of survival, fugitivity, and becoming to explore the multi-dimensional effects of intersectional trauma on the mind, body, and spirit.
Across five realms of storytelling and installation, Dani Smith creates a haunting zone of turbulent liminality where she mines the rupture sites of her identity and experiences as a Black woman from the US living in the UK through artistic processes that trace ghost data looming in our social-political atmosphere and scar tissue.
Painting, drawing, and writing are summoned as portaling technologies of selfhood where the charged energy of trauma-informed locations is hijacked to discover self-serving alternative spaces that re-assert humanity.
Hymns of the Ether, Oil on canvas, 260cm x 102cm, 2021
The Ether Realm
The colonial space time continuum is a myth-making machine. The ether realm is where the byproducts of this process are dumped as toxic waste.
​
In 2018 Little confessed to killing 93 women who were primarily Black. Before his death in 2020, Little claimed he was never caught because he “stayed in the ghettos.” The LAPD homicide detective who caught Little said he preyed on the “less dead,” people who live on the margins of society and whose murders have historically tended to not be thoroughly investigated.
​
Hymns of the Ether is a space created and dedicated to mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, lovers who have died physical, emotional, and spiritual deaths again and again, those who have been taken from us far too soon or those who have fallen through the cracks and discovered far too late, if at all. The faces unseen, words unspoken, and songs unsung.
NonPlace
​
Operating within a matrix of ideological understanding the violence of Black terror shifts between the realms of the physical and the spiritual creating a disconnect between flesh and spirit. Through the severing of the connection between flesh and spirit, a metaphysical death is experienced that places consciousness suspended in nothingness yet the biological body remains as a vessel for this consciousness. I interrogate this space of nothingness as the product of the complex psychological process of experiencing trauma as it is simultaneously erased and denied. Black feminist Christina Sharpe defines this condition as “living in the wake.”
What can be found within this zone? Catalytic potential, perhaps?
STOMP/ Yellow Eyes, Watercolour on paper, 106 cm x 178 cm, 106 cm x 178 cm, 152cm x 178 cm, 152cm x 178 cm, 2022
"Frequency Mirror"
​
86cm x 56cm
Materials
Painting: Plexiglass, glass paint, oil paint, chrome powder, micro pigment, Hot Cheeto dust, Syndol, Benadryl, Nytol, sharp words, night terrors, rude gestures, jerky gazes, eyelashes, friction, turbulence, regret, moonlight, kiwis, red wine, loss, skin cells, resin.
Frame: Amazon packaging, school glue, red wine caps, wire, plaster, rock candy, moonlight, black leaf, LED lights, silicon, glitter.
World Blueprinting
Drawn lines weave schematics to worlds unseen, beyond or below, and not yet here. These worlds of our pasts, and present. Drawing conjures portals into the hidden worlds that arouse our fantasies, the worlds that detonate dreams, and the abstracted worlds of our inner conditions. Each drawing can represent a small or zoomed in fragment or entire ecosystems and galaxies.
Drawings are worlds we inhabit during the process of its emergence.
At shifting scales, we enter a drawing to build the structures of these worlds. One fragment may be a nail in a floorboard or the inner contours of a meteor while a corner of a centimetre of a space translates to entire galaxies.
The building of worlds through drawing is an operation of perceptual learning making them a feedback technology that translates the data from the world around us while integrating this information into the psychological conditions of our inner worlds. The perceptual ability granted through drawing provides an extraordinary vision in which to witness and report scenes of the external.
Insomnia Drawings
Night-time, after 1am or so for me best embodies the thin liminality between freedom and unfreedom, life and death, healing and illness, order and disorder.
The night is often when memory creeps back into consciousness leading to night terrors and disrupted sleep. Swirling ghost reap havoc in the form of anxious rumination, manifestations of OCD, and other destructive habits. But as it also hovers the threshold of manic creativity. The insomnia drawings function as a form of rhythmic regulation that hijacks disordered temporalities of night space to mitigate the traumatic effects by replacing harmful habits with generative creative activity.
Gestures
of ReAbstraction
The process of re-abstraction as a creative process that remixing and re-coding the shattered the pieces to create a new form(s). These new forms are of abstraction because they do not adhere to the architecture of normative concepts the human. Instead, it rejects singularity of self, mind, and body in favor of the poly.
