CURRENT: FOOL’S GOLD HANNAH SMITH

January 25th, 2025 - March 1st, 2025

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 25th 6-9p

houseguest is excited to share its first exhibition after a year-long hiatus: Fool’s Gold, a solo exhibition with new work by Lexington based interdisciplinary artist and educator, Hannah Smith. The exhibition will run from January 18th - March 1st, 2025, with an opening reception on Saturday January 11th from 6-9p.

Artist Statement

I am a Kentucky-based artist who creates sculptures and installations that merge Pop Art references and assemblage strategies with a rebellious punk attitude. Employing recognizable imagery and unconventional materials, I have developed a playful and unpretentious art practice that offers a complex vision of society, in which blue-collar aesthetics embody political and social ideologies of discontent. I am interested in presenting a vision of middle America that exposes the ways in which capitalism exploits our very basic humanness. In doing so, I unveil the often unseen violence within power; power that shapes and confines our self-perception, that commodifies our love, desire, dreams, our most essential human nature; powers that are only escapable if the price is right. My sculptures take the form of empty fast-food baskets, oversized ornamental tassels that spin erratically, and miniaturized signs illuminating seedy motels -- abstracted versions of low-cost and accessible commodities that saturate our everyday surroundings. Look past their blinking lights and metallic veneer, and you’ll observe symbols of the underlying aggression and violence accompanying the failure of the American Dream for a substantial sector of the working population for whom social mobility remains elusive. This affect is often the consequence of abuse of power, societal expectations, and perception of norms; and I explore this sentiment through miniature landscapes, abstracted commercial signage, and fictional machines. I insert the spirit of social unrest into my practice and my sculptural collages. Though subversively humorous,  they capture the tension inherent in the inextricable intertwining of class, power, and human desire. 

Artist Bio

Hannah Smith is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Lexington, KY. They are a Lecturer at the University of Kentucky in Digital Design and 3D Fabrication and are an instructor of printmaking at the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts. Smith’s most recent solo exhibition in January 2024, Homestyle, was curated by Leah Kolb at 2nd Story in Lexington, KY which included works purchased by the UK Art Museum to be shown alongside Sol and Eva LeWitt in the exhibition; Floor, Wall, Outlet: Sculpture and Works on Paper, currently on view. In 2022, their work was awarded a Future Art Award from Mozaik Philanthropy, and they were commissioned to create an installation entitled, Big Gulp for the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft Triennial. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the QRTC, Athens, Greece (2022); Sculptors Alliance, New York, NY (2021); 48-Stunden Neukölln Biennale, Berlin, Germany (2020); and the CICA Museum Seoul, South Korea (2019) among others.

“If the image screen is deemed intact, the attack on it might well possess a transgressive value. However, if it is thought to be already torn, then such transgression is almost beside the point, and this old vocation of the avant-garde is at an end. But there is a third option, and that is to reformulate this vocation, to rethink transgression not as a rupture produced by a heroic avant-garde posited somehow outside he symbolic order but as a fracture traced by a strategic avant-garde inside this order. In this view, the goal of the avant-garde is not to break with the symbolic order absolutely (the dream of absolute transgression is dispelled) but to reveal it in crisis—to register the points at which new possibilities are opened up by this very crisis.”

Hal Foster, Bad New Days: Art Criticism, Emergency. Verso. 2017