American Calendar

Ray Smith started to work on this series of interventions on top of a collection of vintage American Calendars depicting imagery of the American dream. The artist decided to keep the original images as an ironic document of other times. Smith's intervention of these stories contrast an idyllic panorama with our present charged socio political situation.“Each one of these images can be read as surrealistic visions but I can see them as nightmares as well," says Smith.

Smith’ work plays and merges popular culture iconography between time and space finding in this game of juxtaposition, collage and assemblage a medium to re-write history. A medium that has characterized Smith’s painting, sculptures, printmaking and film on his long career. The art critic and curator David Barrosays about Smith’ work “The interval is the space in which we create definitions, the place in which, by means of experience we build our vision of the world, laid on a foundation of a dialectics of opposites. This interval, this border place one that enables things to happen, is the idea that Jacques Ranciere applied to the field of aesthetics to conclude that it is in transition that contemporary art dwells. And also I am convinced the work or Ray Smith, steadfast in his approaches and sincere in his way of expounding pleasure.”