Corey Smith is a painter and photographer originally from Portland, OR residing in Los Angeles, CA. His paintings and photography have appeared in Vice, Elle, ID, FHM, Frequency, Complex, and Happy magazines to name a few. His works have been shown in galleries across the country, including Upper Playground (Portland, OR), Versus (Los Angeles), On Six (San Francisco), KCDC (New York City), and the Orange County Museum of Art.
Smith's high-gloss, ultra-flat paintings capture the joys of plasticity and pre-fab environments, celebrity as the ultimate blank canvas, and the absurd hyperboles of leisure. But rather than repackage the manufactured world into an aestheticized form--a la post-Warholian Pop--Smith favors a post-Pop approach that brings into day-glo focus the dark vision at the corner of the spectator's eye. The subject of the paintings then becomes the tension between the works' fatalistic undercurrents and the celebratory aura created by Smith's use of bold color and bright-lined contour. The result is a Death Valley realism, colored by both sunny Californian optimism and premonitions of death.
Smith's photography develops some of the same themes as his paintings--surface, extremity--but abandons ironies for a more intimate perspective. Most of his subjects are close friends or lovers, and Smith documents them at points where excess bleeds either into empathy or its impossibility, and where the romance of abandon intersects with abandonment.
This is awful, deeply wrong, utterly fantastic stuff, a perfect distillation of a time, place, and generation.
"I anticipate a world where no one has to think, learn, have talent, or be responsible for there actions."
I edited my profile with Thomas' Myspace Editor V4.4
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Paris Hilton series.
Paris Hilton mixed media on wood frame. 3x3ft
"Eating Good In The Neighborhood or South Beach Diet Vs. Darfur Diet" mixed media on wood panel 4x4ft.
"How To Avoid Divorce" mixed media on wood panel 4x4ft.
"The World Is Ours" mixed media on wood panel 4x4ft.
"Arms Race" mixed media on wood panel 4x4ft.
"Start Your Own Religion" mixed media on wood frame 4x4ft.
"Red State Love Affair" mixed media on wood frame 4x4ft.
"Project For a New American Century" (glow in the dark Jesus)mixed media on wood frame 4x4ft. (glow in the dark Jesus)
Check out my personal profile at http://www.myspace.com/capitacorey
