Kaitlyn Jo Smith: Campaign
October 12 - December 7, 2019
CO-OPt Research + Projects presents two concurrent solo exhibitions by Gregory Eddi Jones and Kaitlyn Jo Smith, curated by Aaron Hegert. In the front gallery, Jones’ series Flowers for donald and Countries Glorious (2016-18), for which the artist won the 2018-19 FOAM Talent award, reflects on the overabundance of competing information and opinions via 24-hour news networks, social media, and memes, collaged into digital floral arrangements. Smith’s video, Campaign (2018), on view in the middle gallery, explores the empty rhetoric of political promises and commercial campaigns, using words and phrases from actual speeches from both major political parties, highlighting the vagueness of political messaging. Both exhibitions address the current political climate where “fake news” and “truthiness” hold sway over broad swaths of the populace. The works reflect on the ultimate meaninglessness of populist political discourse in the digital era, in which access to more information does not necessarily make us smarter.
Kaitlyn Jo Smith: Campaign
Campaign reverses power structures by placing the viewer in front of the teleprompter as opposed to behind it. The scrolling text is pulled directly from both John McCain and Barack Obama’s National Convention acceptance speeches (2008) and Levi’s Go Forth advertising campaign from that same year. Copy from all three sources was written in direct response to the 2008 housing market crash and intended for a blue collar audience. The language is generic to the point that the sentences become interchangeable, a tactic I have employed within the piece. Their message is vague but clear: work hard, fight hard, and reclaim what is rightfully yours (the American Dream). Merging the three separate texts into one (not so) new campaign speech blurs party lines with capitalistic agendas to reveal lofty ideals with no real solution.
About the artist:
Kaitlyn Jo Smith (b. 1994, Sycamore, OH) is an interdisciplinary artist focused on the present and future trajectories of America’s working class. Raised by manual laborers in rural Ohio, Smith was thirteen when the housing market crashed and nearly every adult she knew was suddenly out of work. Her artworks render visible the intangible realities of unemployment by utilizing automation, augmented and virtual reality and 3D scanning and printing. These technologies are directly linked to the loss of over 4 million US manufacturing jobs since 2000. Her work has been featured in PDNedu and Don’t Smile Magazine and has shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, Arizona, Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio, Flower City Arts Center in Rosendale, New York, Harry Wood Gallery in Tempe, Arizona and CO-OPt Research + Projects in Lubbock, Texas. She holds a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design (2016) and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Arizona (2020).