Michael E. Smith at Secession: Experiential Sculptures, Installations, and Object-Collages

Michael E. Smith's exhibition at Secession features sculptures, installations, and object-collages that engage with the exhibition space itself. The artist uses found objects, organic materials, and subtle interventions to create an experiential space that sharpens perception and explores themes of presence, absence, and the human condition.

Michael E. Smith creates sculptures, installations, object-collages, and videos, treating each exhibition space as an active dialogue partner. His installations engage multiple senses, incorporating light, sound, and routine disruptions to sharpen overall perception. Smith begins by creating "material sketches" in his studio, testing objects for their potential as signifiers, and finalizes works within the specific exhibition context, with many taking their final form spontaneously. The exhibitions are characterized by a sparse use of means and an understanding of the expressive power of formal relationships. Through strategically placed works, he builds tension between objects, their surrounding space, and intangible interventions. The concentration on a few objects in the room creates an impression of expanse and emptiness, serving as metaphors for human loneliness and vulnerability, which in turn lends greater significance to the individual works. Smith's engagement with the given architecture is notable. His works are like traces, pointing to the presence of a specific person in a specific place, making each exhibition a unique phenomenological event. Simple interventions, such as altering light conditions or removing door handles, create minor disruptions in habitual systems, sensitizing both visitors and staff. He sometimes displays objects in non-public areas, conceptually breaking open the exhibition space and raising questions about public access, the boundaries of art, and its institutions. His sculptures and object-collages are typically composed of few elements or stand alone as ready-mades. Smith utilizes found, used, discarded, and sometimes broken everyday items like furniture, clothing, and electronics, often combining them with organic components such as prepared animals or animal/human remains. The human body, or its absence, is central to his work, juxtaposing presence and absence, movement and stillness, lightness and heaviness. Smith's often dark and unsettling assemblages carry nuanced tones beyond their initial somber mood. He acknowledges that art itself is a complex language, with each object, action, and place laden with stories and meaning. His exploration of the human-object-nature relationship is described with great specificity, recognizing its complexity and mystery. A sharp humor is evident, reflected in aesthetic sensibility and formal wit, for instance, when connecting a plastic chair with a sea turtle skull due to their striking formal similarities. His strategy is reduction and maximum focus, aiming for the essential. Smith's artistic practice often evokes associations with environmental destruction, the disappearance of habitats for humans and animals, political and social experiences, ecological crises, capitalist consumerism, waste, violence, death, and social injustice. His origins in Detroit, a city emblematic of industrial decline and working-class struggles yet also a hub for diverse music and alternative culture, have been particularly formative. For his exhibition at Secession, which spans the Graphic Cabinet and the gallery on the first sub-basement floor, Smith developed new works produced, arranged, assembled, and installed on-site. Materials acquired at the artist's request or brought by him include used turbo-fans for drying spaces, rock fragments, a human skull bone from the mid-19th century, rabbit furs, a used couch, empty guitar cases, and dried gourds. The installation deliberately modifies the architecture, employing reduced lighting from the exterior and minimal LED bars, creating sonic disturbances with turbo-fans that cause the magnetic fire door to vibrate and produce noise. Bread boxes and dried pumpkin stalks are arranged to suggest frozen movement, and a half-visible Batman logo is formed by thousands of pumpkin stems. In a second room, a red velvet curtain has been removed, revealing installation points, and two conference tables are set up, with chairs neatly stacked. A leather jacket is nailed between wall pilasters, and any written reference to the exhibition at the entrance is absent. In the Graphic Cabinet, a skull-like sculpture with bottle gourds emerging from its eye sockets creates a comic-book effect, symbolizing his collaborations with a farmer for dried pumpkin stems and a special cultivation of gourds to achieve long, thin necks.

Tickets for exhibitions at Secession can be purchased via the provided link. The page also mentions that the building is open Tuesday-Sunday from 10 AM to 6 PM. Further details on admission are available via a dedicated information and tickets page linked in the navigation.