David B. Smith

[5] Textiles, soft sculpture and folk art practices influence Smith’s works, and he often blends these forms within a single piece.

Speculative fiction and comic book narratives are a lens through which Smith creates, and his works imagine future worlds, creatures, and societies as a way to envision decolonized space and reinvestigate notions of race, climate change and alternate states of consciousness.

Smith writes:“Sci-fi narratives are very compelling to me - imagining stories and persons, objects and creatures from other planets, VR realities, or star systems.

Digital technologies and image gathering help reveal these worlds and continue a line of artistic questioning and layering until I get work that exists in a 3D - an interactive and physically relational element, creating viewer interconnectivity....revealing worlds and selves that might be hidden beneath historical and preconceived notions of what something is to invite the question of what something could be.”For Smith, every object, person or memory is informed by a cultural landscape, made of images, lived experiences, memories, gestures, and sound.

He playfully offers the range of possibility within these experiences by bending, folding, and layering textiles with digital, sonic, found, and created images.