Truth + beauty (Gippsland)

This was a curated regional museum solo exhibition of paintings, found objects and installations. It represented a significant shift in a 30 year career of practice in that installations were included for the first time (eg approx 500 keys and locks in a glass case). This shift was based on reflections of the currency of contemporary sculptural work. International artists working with historical found objects, Cornelia Parker and Ai Wei Wei were seen by the artist at Frieze in London. Smith had researched the Truth + Beauty exhibition theme for several years. The sculptural fossil work, Geological Time, and the painting, A history of the Gabo Island lighthouse, were acquired by the Gippsland Art Gallery. The curator of the Gippsland Art Gallery, Claire Watson, wrote a catalogue essay. Smith's catalogue essay, When I consider how my light is spent, quotied Milton and The Enlightenment poets. Both these essays questioned the role of the Contemporary Sublime and the meaning of destructive over-painting of precious objects, romanticism, collecting, classification, and local concerns as a vehicle for globally relevant concepts. Watson's curatorial aims for the exhibition were to illustrate the bridging of art and science at a level that references both the history of the Enlightenment and the local environment. She also wished to illustrate that the creation of artworks from collections of objects referencing the classical museum housing theme of precious objects in vitrines. This exhibition was the vehicle for a contemporary (almost destructive) sublimity where art and science meet. eg. 11m year old fossils, Clypeaster Gippslandicis, were collected, installed and painted on with mathematical timescales in the work Geological Time. This destructive refashioning of precious, precious objects (eg Fossils) to bring them from pure science to contemporary art re-fashions our notions of the romantic and results in a new appraisal of Contemporary sublime.