MD SMITH STUDIO

MD SMITH STUDIO

Lyre Liar is a new series I recently started of digitally fabricated hardwood ‘quilts’ that explore historical quilt-making imagery of Appalachia. In leafing through the pages of a book on West Virginia quilts I came upon a striking Baltimore Album

Lyre Liar

Four Pole Dig is an ongoing series of sculptures resulting from my physical exploration of “The Bottoms.” The Bottoms is a floodplain near my house where Four Pole Creek empties into the Ohio River. The space has been used as a makeshift dump by l

Four Pole Dig

Learning to Count is an ongoing series of photographs which document large-scale ephemeral installations I create on public lands to draw attention to wildfires and climate change in Colorado. For this series I visit Colorado’s largest burn zones an

Learning to Count

In the fall of of 2021 I started building conceptual furniture as a part of my artistic practice. These works connect with the places for which they were built as much as how they function. For Well Pump Chair I created an oak chair that honored a

Selected Furniture

From curator Arielle Myers: “Matthew Smith’s work similarly serves as a translation of memory to objects, centering around one particular winter in his hometown of Wabash, Indiana. When his father’s job required that he temporarily move away from t

The Spirit in the Flame

Splitting Water with Wood employs conceptions of faith as a crucial lens to understand its elements; a handcrafted boat as an exploratory apparatus, the labor surrounding it as an act of devotion, and a resulting performance that experiments with

Splitting Water with Wood

you feel that way real strong is an immersive installation exploring my religious upbringing by utilizing multiple video projections, sound, and felt scrims that are reminiscent of church banners. The banners are adorned with a Bible verse handwri

you feel that way real strong

i don’t know when but a day’s gonna come creates an apocalyptic sense of space and time using rocks painted with verses and imagery from the Book of Revelations. The verses, which describe the second coming of Jesus, read like descriptions of the

i don't know when but a day's gonna come

The Thin Places describes the Celtic idea of moments where heaven and earth meet or where we find ourselves closer to a spiritual realm. For the video, I created a series of fishing bobbers which were then used on a nearby lake. Watching the video

The Thin Places

I have been creating an ongoing series of felt storyboards reminiscent of the ones I grew up with in Sunday School. Rather than telling significant Bible anecdotes, these artworks tell bizarre accounts of faith or childhood stories of fishing.

Felt Story Board Series

On February 10th, the date Boulder was “founded,” I slept in a handmade tent where the first white explorers settled in the area in their search for gold.  X Marks the Spot was a performance that drew upon the palpable history of Settler’s Pa

X Marks the Spot

The Forests are the Flags was a series of site-specific trail signs placed in Rocky Mountain National Park. I started the project by photographing dozens of aspen trees from RMNP that had people’s initials cut into them. From the photographs, I ac

The Forests are the Flags

We All Move Forward was a temporary public intervention that took place on the Boulder campus of the University of Colorado. Along the walking paths, I drew signage in sidewalk chalk acknowledging the three non-human animals that I saw using the p

We All Move Forward

From Bronx to Byram chronicles the six rivers I crossed each day on the way to my residency at the Clay Art Center in Port Chester, NY. Each pipe follows the path of the actual river. I built the pipes out of clay I collected from the sink traps a

From Bronx to Byram

Block by Block

Block by Block

Invasive Species was a social practice project in which I collected litter from Clark Reservation State Park in Jamesville, NY and created durable ceramic vessels from it. The ceramic vessels took the forms of plastic soda bottles, styrofoam cups,

Invasive Species