LA Times: ‘Refuge’ explores the Utopia of everyday discards
Exhibition at the California African American Museum examines shelter, homelessness and the excess of our stuff. Deborah Vankin reports
Shinique Smith was filling her car’s gas tank late one night in February when she noticed a vase and a child’s pink, plastic scooter sitting atop a garbage can. As an artist who works with found objects, she rounded up what she assumed to be trash. Then a homeless man living out of his truck emerged, directing her attention to handwritten price tags on the objects. He was selling the goods for gas money.
Smith filled his tank in exchange for the items, then incorporated them into an art installation she was making about homelessness and the exchange of goods flowing through donation centers.
That finished piece, “Donation Center” (2018), is one of several works on view through Sept. 9 in Smith’s solo exhibition “Refuge” at the California African American Museum. The show has theatrical installations, abstract paintings, mixed media wall works and soft sculptures made from recycled clothing, scraps of fabric, personal items and found objects, among other materials.
“Things that were mine, things that belonged to friends and family. Stuff,” Smith says. “Really basic stuff stands out to me. I’m fascinated by the way we feather our nests as creatures. And the way we survive when we don’t have a nest.”
