COMUNE PRESENTS:
COREY SMITH “OBSOLETE DREAMS”
February 5th – March 1st, 2010
Opening Reception – February 5, 2010, 7-12pm
Portland, OR– February 5, 2010 – COMUNE presents DROP CITY artist, Corey Smith’s, “Obsolete Dreams” solo exhibition at Worksound Gallery, 820 SE Alder, Portland, OR 97214.
We’ve seen the future, and it only looks good in hardware specs. Amid famine, collapse, and massacre, we dream of freedom. From the pyramid to the moon shuttle, man’s greatest endeavor has always been to subjugate death and the dreams of sleep—to own them, control them, escape there—to paint our own new futures onto the blank slate of unfilled coordinates.
In Obsolete Dreams, artist Corey Smith confronts the hulking physicality of these useless masters of dreams and death: Cold-War stealth bombers, moon shuttles, astronauts, the unholy engine fueled by the American flag. But Smith remakes them according to their own dream logic, that alien symbolism of deflective curve and angle that is both perfect and perfectly incomprehensible to the life that is always right here in front of us.
So in Smith’s work, silent death comes in the bright colors of advertising, and bombers swing lovely as children’s models on wires. The grim, grey haze of a satellite photo takes on a more intense reality than the one you know, because it comes from that high, floating future. Even if the art of science is war and escape, there’s nothing more romantic than chasing the zero all the way down. And space is where you dream, when you dream on empty.
Corey Smith’s Obsolete Dreams calls out to the primal dreams themselves: Long live the dead dreams, long after their masters have forgotten how to dream.
About COREY SMITH.
Corey Smith is a painter, sculptor and photographer from Portland, OR, who currently resides in Los Angeles, CA. His paintings and photography have appeared in Vice, Elle, ID, FHM, Frequency, Complex, and Arkade magazines, among others. His works have been shown in galleries across the country, including Upper Playground (Portland, OR), Versus (Los Angeles), On Six (San Francisco), KCDC (New York City), and the Orange County Museum of Art. Corey Smith currently works as Art Director at COMUNE and manages the Drop City artist program/Strange Weather Gallery. To view more of his work, visit coreysmithtimetravel.com and highpoweredstreetdrugs.com.
