Victoria Smits – SAIC Graduate Exhibition 2023

SAIC SHOWS 2023 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Graduates

SAIC SHOWS 2023 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Victoria Smits

Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts Degree

victorialsmits@gmail.com

victorialsmits.com

Victoria Smits is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Eugene, Oregon. She studied English, art, and secondary education at Calvin College and received an MA in English Education from University of Buffalo with a concentration in creative writing. After a career in art and English education, she embraced a full-time art practice and has exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at Leonor R. Fuller Gallery in South Puget Sound, WA, the School of Art Institute of Chicago SITE 280 Gallery, and the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts in Lubbock, TX. Her art and writing have been published in Home-Works, Torpor House, and Literary Life Chapbook.

Smits’s work investigates the defining characteristics of temperament and caregiving as an access point to the meta discussion of memory and existence, corporeal validity in defiance of hegemonic systems, and how heritage informs conscious and unconscious connection.

Victoria Smits - Haptic Memoir (Epilogue to)

Haptic Memoir (Epilogue to), 2023, Installation includes clay time-capsules, cochineal dye, microbial cellulose, preserved night-blooming cereus, silk bridal voile, used dryer sheets, sound, 8 x 9 x 9 Ft.

In recent months, my 83 year-old mother's short-term memory has shown signs of gradual loss. Possible causes are age, the stress of losing her sister and best friend within a few months during the pandemic — where grief patterns were interrupted due to stay-home orders, potential vitamin deficiency, and/or the stress of an accident and move - also during the pandemic. As a mother of four children in a blended family, three of whom are adults - two of them graduating in June of 2020 near the beginning of the pandemic, and a middle-school-aged son, I find myself in an augmented liminal space. The transition of children into adulthood in tandem with my aging mother creates a movement of queer mothering: I must "mother" children, my own mother, and myself. As a means of exploration, the aspect of memory loss currently experienced by my mother references the impact of generalized memory - how does memory inform how we see ourselves and how we engage others? How do persisting memories form experience? How does memory inform how we "mother"? This sculptural exploration around memory involves the static and fluid constructs of ceramic vessels as time-capsules, microbial cellulose formed over objects of absence, textile references to unfound agency during a lifetime, and sound — including my mother's voice. Each portion alludes to aspects of memories - those secured by collusion within community, those aligned with individual intersectional identities, and those that transform over time.

Victoria Smits - Haptic Memoir (Epilogue to), detail

Haptic Memoir (Epilogue to), detail, 2023, Installation includes clay time-capsules, cochineal dye, microbial cellulose, preserved night-blooming cereus, silk bridal voile, used dryer sheets, sound

Victoria Smits - On Becoming: Mother Worry/Mother Warrior

On Becoming: Mother Worry/Mother Warrior, 2022, Avocado-dyed cheesecloth, poly, bisque-fired clay, sensor-activated sound, 6 x 4 x 3 Ft.

The sculpture considers sustained worry about passing insecure attachment to future generations and works in tandem with coordinating text.

Victoria Smits - Sum of My Parts

Sum of My Parts, 2022, Artist's wedding dress, avocado-dyed cheesecloth, Nigerian fabric from fieldwork, linens from paternal grandmother, clothes worn after birth of artist's last child, fabric map made by artist's youngest child, baby blanket, artist's father's tools, 64 x 64 In.

The structure replicates conceptual order, reenacted here in the form of a hand-stitched quilt; it is a collection of textile references to identity and how they inform relationships.

Victoria Smits - Let's Play

Let's Play, 2022, Dense foam, latex paint, various sizes from 18 - 52 In.

Contour line drawings offer beginning structure and immediacy, and at the same time trigger three-dimensional impressions and neural codes of vision. I asked these contours to come to life in the form of fabricated, enlarged versions of some of my father's tools. They function as formative reinvention toward lightness and play.

Haptic Memoir (Epilogue to), 2023, Sound portion of installation, 2:31 mins

On Becoming: Mother Worry/Mother Warrior, 2022, Sound portion of installation, 1:18 mins

Letter to My Father, 2022, video, 4:18 mins, spoken word by DeMorge Brown, music by Steve Nyse

Based on research on Attachment Theory, this video and other work in my MFA studies investigates evolved compassion for those who came before us, who were our primary caregivers, and who were “unskillful in their expression of love” (Ocean Vuong).

My interdisciplinary practice is informed by my background in a distinctly rigid religious home focused on intellectual and theological systems of thinking and being in the world. The iconographic nature of this existence readied me with a deeply symbolic way of thinking, an active and nurtured passion for inquiry, and a broad responsibility toward seeing and valuing others. My visual explorations are a quest for informed consciousness, percipience, and agency, where text and visual converge, where science and cheesecloth hold hands, where the abstraction of the natural environment intersects with the maternal.

I analyze how internalized beliefs about self, identity, and empowerment are carried from parent to child. My work integrates the plausibility of strife and discord as moments of evolution and growth. I begin in my daily life, as artist-mother-human, culling from the surrounding environment in terms of materials, happenings, encounters, habits, behaviors, and reflection. I marry these with context specific research and experimentation, acquiring knowledge where there is lack.

My MFA exhibition and thesis reference memory, the principle of non-linear realities, and mutuality vs. symmetry — our relationships are mutual but not symmetrical.