Art is a way for me to learn about my imagination and my body - what I fear, what I dream, and what ways of relating, acting and changing might be available to me. I’ve made it a life-long practice to search for inner worlds, spaces for where desire and dream can create other realities, and what queer, Lebanese textile-artist Nicolas Moufarrege called the ability “to travel without leaving the room.”
Growing up and attending public school in Washington, D.C. in the 80s, I felt immersed in a system where certain populations were isolated and suffering and others were excelling and given all the opportunities - with those succeeding fearing and blaming those who were suffering for structurally caused problems, often along racial, class, and gender lines.
Being the grandson of Jewish immigrants who escaped the Holocaust in Europe and anti-semitism in America, I was taught to avoid trouble, to keep my head down and blend in - but this fragmented my sense of self and I felt caught and frozen, afraid to speak out and traumatized by generations of ancestral violence and oppression. I was angry about injustice, felt in relation to what had happened to my ancestors and community, yet also benefited as a male-identifying American with white privilege, causing inner conflict and questioning that continues and will continue throughout my life.
This inner struggle left me with a lack of tools for expression and I played the role of observer - having panic attacks when called on in class and forgetting what I was saying halfway through a sentence. Looking for a way to transgress the rigidity of written and spoken language, I was drawn to visual art. It was like a secret code that revealed a path to a world where I felt safe, and had a sense of togetherness with humanity. Alongside this realization, I immersed myself in the imaginary worlds of video games and the cartoons of the 80s and 90s, where I felt free to explore fantasy and multidimensional ways of being and relating.
Around the age of 10, I began taking photographs of my experiences. My family liked to travel to unfamiliar places and I wanted to preserve that feeling and share it. I found photography linked worlds through showing the relationship between landscapes and cultures. Sharing these photographs also linked me to other people, cementing a lifelong pursuit and practice of photography.
Through studying art history, photography, and psychology, I searched for clues to the ways our minds and bodies work to create worlds, learning that truth is generated through choices and expressions made over time, but also depends on assumptions and intentions within the historical and cultural contexts of those choices. The friction between these two realities was where I cultivated the meditative, philosophical and photographic practices that form the undercurrent of my artmaking, resonating with practices such as plant medicine ceremonies, psychotherapy, meditation and showing art and performing music. Once music became part of my practice, I began to reclaim my voice, allowing it to sing, speak and make meaning, revealing itself as I used it more and more.
When I was 28 my father Joshua committed suicide - a rupture that continuously ripples through my practice. Grieving this loss through my art helped me uncover the potential for art to heal, build an arena for communal expressions of loss, and map out ways to reduce suffering through remembering, storytelling and the imaginings of futures and other states of communication and consciousness.
I began to output images onto fabric, a medium I could touch, bend, shape, and sculpt with my hands. This allowed me to combine the storytelling of photography with the immediacy of textile craft, and I used it to build environments where musical performances and other events could take place. Blending all my creative impulses into one practice, I found I could embody and respond to uncertainty, loss, trauma, hopes, dreams and whatever else came my way. This new way of working was more labor intensive than photography, but each stitch and decision would be recorded within the work. This thrilled me, mirroring my intention to use patience and persistence to reflect and build ideas and my physical reality.
This breakthrough helped me to reconnect with my ancestors; my grandmothers Stella and Evelyn practiced embroidery, sewing, and other crafts, and my grandfather Jack was a pattern designer who owned a textile business. My work connected me to my past and honored it, while acknowledging a contemporary expression of the traditions from which I originated. I see myself as a link in a familiar chain of makers, healers, and survivors.
This show is not only about what I’ve created, but attempts to communicate, see, speak and imagine alongside the viewer. I hope that we can all learn from each other - to build and travel to the worlds in our imaginations, in our memories, and in our dreams, and I offer my art as an open gesture of care to all of our relations - past, present, and future.
These works were created on the unceded, ancestral, and occupied, traditional Lenape homeland, and are displayed on the lands of the Susquehannok Peoples. In the Spring of 2021, they will visit the land of the Matinecocks. In imagining worlds that can exist, do exist, and have existed, my art desires a moving towards reconciliation and also acknowledges the damaging effects of colonialism on these lands and its peoples.
– David B. Smith