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Marvin Touré
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Isla Hansen
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How to Get to Make Believe
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Andrea Peña
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States of Transmutation
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Asim Waqif
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Assume the Risk
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Shohei Katayama
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As Below, So Above
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The Mattress Factory is an artist-centered museum, international residency program and renowned producer and presenter of installation art. We say “yes” to artists, offering time and space to dream and realize projects in our hometown, Pittsburgh, PA. We invite audiences from around the world and around the corner to step inside, immerse and connect with the artistic process.

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Kiki Smith

Flight Mound

1998

This play is a reflection on the (im)possibility of accepting diversity and the other. The fragmented body of the neoplasm—the fruit of unstable conditions—overcomes barriers, loves and denies itself and others, wanders around, forgetting its profession. It frequently and with pleasure divides, goes through dangerous palpation, questions the possibility of contact with the experience of the other. Poorly brought up but very successful, it invites us to a trans-species transition.

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The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh provided Kiki Smith with their extensive collections as source material for her installation. She made detailed drawings of a variety of pelts from birds that nest in western Pennsylvania. The drawings were made by scratching lines directly into Kodalith film and were then transferred to 25 different silkscreens.

Smith printed the bird drawings onto printed fields of color that were based on the feather colors of the birds. The printed fabric pieces were trimmed, numbered, and then photographed. Smith used the photographs to design the quilts, which consist of two or three segments from different printed pieces. She chose to combine Eastern European floral print fabrics for the backsides of the blankets. We constructed the 68 blankets by piecing together the floral printed fabric and matching it to front pieces at random.

The forty black-painted bronze bluejays in the exhibition were cast from a wax bird carved by Smith. Smith rearranged the packing quilts and the cast birds several times before arriving at their final configuration: a single mound, with a black quilt on the top, allowing only the edges of the ones beneath to be visible with the 40 birds across the gallery floor oriented in a single direction.

Exhibition

Kiki Smith: February 8 – July 31, 1998
About The Artist

Kiki Smith has been known since the 1980s for her multidisciplinary practice which relates to the human condition and the natural world. Smith uses a broad variety of materials, continuously expanding and evolving a body of work that includes sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing, and textiles.

Smith has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions worldwide including over 25 solo museum exhibitions. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been the recipient of several awards including the 2012 National Medal of Arts, conferred by Hillary Clinton; the 2010 Nelson A. Rockefeller Award, Purchase College School of the Arts; the 2009 Edward MacDowell Medal, the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2000, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center, among others. She is an adjunct professor at New York University and Columbia University. Smith has been represented by Pace Gallery, New York since 1994.

More from this Artist

Bird from Muybridge

Little Space

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Bird from Muybridge

Little Space

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