THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 30, 1996 TAG: 9606290032
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E8 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Art review
SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 81 lines
DAN SMITH'S local debut may not be a sweet one, but it makes up in substance what it lacks in sugar.
The Newport News artist moved to this area from South Carolina in the last year; he came here with his wife, Lise Swensson, the new executive director of the Peninsula Fine Arts Center. Smith's show at Tidewater Community College's Visual Arts Center in downtown Portsmouth includes both his handsome painted portraits and his gritty installation art that centers on his personal, often dark reactions to recent journeys.
The portraits show off his expressive technique; he has a truly rare capacity to create portraits with a rich, painterly surface that render his subjects in a psychologically penetrating way.
But the installations are the reason for visiting the TCC gallery.
Walking in, the environment overwhelms with visual and written information. How to begin making sense of it all?
There's a canvas floor mat with dirt neatly spread out in portions of a divided circle.
There are large black-and-white photos of a naked man coiled in a fetal position and then hiding among a ``forest'' of sticks stuck in wet sand. The photos are hung near mysterious arrangements of chairs, tiles, shovels, mirrors and organic material.
There is a man-sized metal trunk on the floor, with a lit blue exit sign at one end. It lies beneath a metal goal post structure, from which dangles a giant organic blob; the blob's chest is lit up. Is this a stand-in for a person?
Moving clockwise from the entrance, the first wall piece - featuring a map of South Carolina - begins to explain the order Smith has devised from chaos.
Starting in 1990, Smith began to tour that state, and to document his trip. He systematized his journey, removing whim and decision from his arena.
A later series, begun in 1994 and still in progress, expanded a similar search into the entire United States.
A viewer might imagine Smith thought like this: ``There's so much world out there. Where should I go?'' So he channeled his decision-making into making up a system, a pseudo-scientific means of choosing. He found the center of the state, Columbia, then divided the map into 12 segments, representing the months in a year. And he developed more obsessive little rules about how, when and in what manner he would approach each site.
Smith visited a new place each month, and made it his business to record objective data related to his trip, like elevation, temperature and time of arrival.
This first series is called the ``Man/Land Series,'' and five of the 12 works are at TCC. Clearly, Smith is exploring man's relationship to the Earth.
For ``Site No. 5,'' a piece called ``Acts,'' Smith created a diptych. On the left is a petri dish containing an aerial land photograph, centered on a big sheet of grid paper. On the right is a large photo of the coiled fetal man, seeming to be cocooned in dirt.
Smith wrote the expressive, poetic text that accompanies and is, in fact, part of each work. For ``Acts,'' he pointed out how ``on the right, man is enclosed by nature, and on the left, nature is enclosed by man.''
That's a mirror image, of course. Not coincidentally, other portions of the show feature actual mirrors - in the knothole of a tree, in the matting surrounding a photo of a mounted dead bird.
The suggestion: We have seen the enemy, and the enemy is us. The lesson: Nature is within us and without us. If we destroy or disrespect nature, we are only doing the same to ourselves.
In any case, that's what I took from it. Certainly, as with any artwork, the installations are autobiographical, too.
The compulsive nature of Smith's travels could give a viewer the feeling that he is deliberately working through some inner kinks.
So many myths exist about the joys of travel. Sure, when you're paying for a cruise or part of a tour group, the journey is easy. But when go it alone, and your approach is honest, and your destinations far from glitzy, you just might find a dead fox flung over barbed wire, and somehow imagine it happened to you, too. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
``Acts'' by Dan Smith includes a large photo of a man in a fetal
position seemingly cocooned in dirt.
Graphic
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[For complete graphic, please see microfilm] by CNB