These are no doll’s houses but miniature architectural artworks. Joshua Smith’s compact sculptures, often created in a 1:20 scale, capture the everyday environment we live in; the buildings are not of international renown or pristine in appearance, instead they’re part of a community. Its individuality showing the different aspects that make a society. Inspired from settings around the world, these miniature artworks hold a similarity that will have you thinking of the urbanscapes you grew around; their character and the contribution to the neighbourhood showing clearly on its delipidated façade – the dirt, the use, the over-use as things fall apart and a touch of art in the graffiti – a nod maybe to Smith’s urban art as a stencil artist.
Many of Smith’s buildings have an overarching sense of being locked in time; their existence and use having spanned decades and through the years they’ve seen it all; development, decay, politics, and a changing economic climate. Smith’s microscopic attention to detail means that nothing has been left out, encapsulating everything about the building, and as such the people who’ve used it. In 23 Temple Street (2017) you can really see Smith’s ability to see all the sub-layers; from different shutter designs, graffiti (tags, stencils, stickers), a tiny chain lock, the yellowed and moulded newspapers in the window, to the corroded structure; the plaster peeling, the curtains frayed, the bars bent, while the posters below have lost their lustre having become instead dirtied and peeling. As a whole the building looks as if it’s perishing – provoking feelings that this is not just a reflection of a way of life past and present, but also socio-economic difficulties. And maybe even a threat to the existence of small individual stores who are being squished out by developers and giants of capitalism.
23 Temple Street, 2017. For VOLTA Art Fair, New York City. Joshua Smith. Photo Credit: Andrew Beveridge/ASB Creative
In Smith’s sculptures you can imagine the people; the buildings’ owners ready to help a customer at a drop of a hat, while they in turn go about their day taking for grant its existence, to the residents trapped in the squalor of some of them. But, and here is the key, they’re all alive – in Smith’s art you can truly picture the lives of those who surround the buildings. It’s anything but fake, which is ironic for an artificial creation, however in Smith’s hands you can almost hear the voices of those in this community, and it seems they’re saying – don’t ignore me, this is my life – and through this you see the beauty of the buildings even as it falls to ruin.
Smith’s skills are exquisite, his level of detail requiring a steady hand and hours of patience. When seeing his work you end up asking yourselves questions not just about the inhabitants, but also simpler childlike ones of curiosity, such as; are there actual mini-bottles in that grocery store? Will the photobooth shoot out mini snapshots? And just how detailed is the inside compared to the outside?
The magic of Joshua Smith’s art is that he sees what makes something alive, recapturing it with an intensity that achieves new heights – even if they’re small in appearance.
