Going in: notes on Dean Smith’s
“The center is the edge of the threshold”

by Matt Sussman

The title of this gathering of Dean Smith’s work, “The center is the edge of the threshold,” implies a potentially ceaseless movement inward. Interior becomes exterior becomes interior ad infinitum. Smith’s art frequently exerts just such a centripetal pull on the eye. The longer one looks, the more unstable become the referential or conceptual footholds a viewer might bring to Smith’s work. As Smith put it in an interview with fellow artist Bruno Fazzolari: “My goal is to trip up viewers visually, to get them to ask, ‘What is this?’ And then have them be unable to land on any one specific thing.” Suggestive in its indeterminacy, transfixing in its suggestiveness, Smith’s art offers an occasion for sustained absorption in the bardo between seeing and knowing, abstraction and figuration, the material and the numinous. Comprising recent additions to the growing corpus of diamond net/focusing drawings, environment collages and labyrinth pieces that Smith has steadily added to over the past 15 years, the selection on view here represents a process of continual refinement within each of these discrete bodies of work that has only strengthened their rip tide like pull.

The graphite-on-paper drawings Smith refers to off-handedly as “diamond nets” and “focusing” are exemplary. In these, tiny marks repeat from radial points, their direction and density shifting in accordance with the boundaries created by nested or intersecting shapes – triangles and squares are common forms – that cut across the page. Smith works from a constraint-based process here, laying out certain compositional parameters before undertaking the intensive mark making that fills the spaces he has bounded. Immediately, one is sympathetic to the hours of attention required of the artist to create these pieces. Procedural in origin, these drawings nonetheless eschew any of that word’s lackluster connotations. The diamond net/focusing pieces seem to breathe, rippling with currents of energy. Though resolutely abstract, they inevitably summon eidetic comparisons to both natural phenomena and their representations: the whorls of magnetized iron filings; the synchronous directionality of schools of fish; the tumbling arrows of a wind vector plot.

I think Smith would welcome these associations or their art historical counterparts—a sampling that might include Agnes Denes’ probability pyramids, Karl Blossfeldt’s architectural photographs of dried flora, Yayoi Kusama’s early infinity net canvases, and Bruce Conner’s Rorschach-like inkblot paintings–even if they are only indirectly in play. Similarly, while Smith’s work might, at first glance, be easily be dubbed “psychedelic,” “mystical,” or “cosmological” these terms are not wholly accurate descriptors for what is happening in Smith’s art. Smith is not attempting to visualize expanded consciousness, convey spiritual beliefs, or map astronomical timescales, although he is keenly aware of and deeply interested in how other artists and image-makers across the centuries have set about representing inner experience, the ineffable, or the infinite by way of the crude instruments of our senses.