Brendan L. Smith

About the Artist

Brendan L. Smith has shown his unconventional mixed-media artwork in many gallery exhibitions and alternative venues in the D.C. area. His Ghosts in the Machine series was featured in a solo exhibition at the American Visionary Art Museum’s restaurant in Baltimore. He is a former member of the Sparkplug Collective and has won several grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Brendan also is an award-winning arts writer for several publications. He previously lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he showed his artwork in solo and group exhibitions across northern New Mexico.   

Artist's Statement

I began making art more than 20 years ago when my TV broke in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I wanted a creative outlet so I scavenged rusty metal from sun-baked arroyos and created my own unconventional style of mixed-media artwork. Everyday objects, and the vast amount of stuff we throw away, are infused with their own meanings that can be transformed with new associations. My new series called The Places We Forgot features photos I have taken of abandoned places across the country that I transform with layers of melted beeswax, resin, and other materials. The artwork explores the malleability of memory, that tension between the comforting fog of nostalgia and a sense of melancholy for roads untaken. The dreamlike images possess a strange and forlorn beauty revealed amidst the broken glass, rotting wood, and rusted metal. Our physical spaces often are demolished or gentrified in the name of “progress,” but these abandoned places speak to our collective history and the resounding echoes of our past.