Greg Smith

Susan Inglett Gallery is pleased to present Greg Smith: Absent Word Double.

Greg Smith stages exhibitions that consider the possibilities and problems presented by our current technological deluge. Absent Word Double is an experiment in which the artist limits his vocabulary to the 2048 words contained in the BiP39 protocol (a mnemonic phrase used to secure digital assets). Here the word list is used as the sole basis for everyday language.

As a result, textual musings in the objects and installations are necessarily ham-fisted as they consider human foibles and hopes amidst technological promise. The text gropes, but also concretizes: it contains coded messages that enable observant (or lucky) viewers to access to digital wallets containing governing tokens to a range of DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations). As such, Absent Word Double is inspired by and implicated in the crypto-utopian project, embodying its optimism, its delusionality, and its commitment to D.I.Y. world-building. To quote the artist:

"Sometimes constraint is exactly what is required to slip the bonds. I respect the urge in the crypto folks who, fed up with the garbage, attempt to start anew. Under the mountains of hype, people are serious about trying to do governance, social groups, and cities in a new way. There's potential, but I'm also deeply skeptical of the possibility of making a clean break. The gears spin furiously and promise so much; this project is both about how it breaks down, and how it can be used differently."

The artworks in Absent Word Double are a series of gestures and mechanisms that try to fill the resultant holes left by Greg Smith’s BiP39 language-cull. Constraint here becomes a crucible, a laboratory for replacing what’s missing. A calendar, for example, is scattered through the gallery, but it lacks those six months that didn't make the cut. The artist provides his own replacements; lost time is restored with ruffles, wax, commas, and old men.

What to make of this campy new economy, hamstrung and handmade? Wrapped up in loss, full of holes, scattered, exuberant, corrupted by money, artificial, and “functional”, Absent Word Double offers a doppelganger of the utopian urge, internal skepticism included. In the wise words of the 2048:

"Only people that embrace chronic divorce truly under stand life under endless decline among that crucial vivid fever camp govern axis."

Greg Smith (b. 1970) stages exhibitions that consider the possibilities and problems presented by our current technological deluge. He builds installations using an amalgam of unlikely materials and processes that trace contemporary limits of language, ownership, and governance. Through his enigmatic work, the artist delivers coded messages that reward the curious viewer with access to hidden assets. Smith has had solo exhibitions at the Grinnell Museum of Art, Grinnell, IA; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; and White Columns, NYC, among others. His work has been featured in exhibitions at MoMA, NYC, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, and an upcoming group exhibition at Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, March 2022. Smith was awarded a Guggenheim Grant in 2013.