Michael Smith and Joshua White - Artists' Talk and Screening
June 17, 2008 - 6:30 pm - Free
EAI - 535 West 22nd Street, 5th floor

Smith and White, via EAI

Longtime collaborators Michael Smith and Joshua White will screen and discuss some of their work tonight at EAI. White in particular has taken an interesting path towards his current installation work with Smith. After studying theater at Carnegie Mellon, White began designing psychedelic light shows for such famous industrialists as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and the Doors. Later, White would design the "Warhol Party," scene for Midnight Cowboy as well as directing television episodes of Seinfeld, Club MTV, and Inside the Actor's Studio. Many of these spectacles would no doubt appeal to Smith's alter ego, 'Mike Smith,' who has long inhabited the artist's work as a sort-of tabula rasa of late capital, a subject to be worked on and through by the larger cultural machinery. The pairing of these two in 1997 can then be seen, bizarrely enough, as emblematic of the recently shrinking distance between audience and producer; as Mike, the conceptually perfect denizen of the administered world, gets a personal sandbox designed by his very own captain of consciousness.