TIFFANY SMITH
301 Gallery
Tiffany Smith is an interdisciplinary artist from the Caribbean diaspora working in photography, video, installation, and design. Using plant matter, design and home decor elements, pattern, and costuming as cultural signifiers, Smith creates photographic portraits, site responsive installations, user engaged experiences, and assemblages focused on identity, representation, cultural ambiguity, and displacement. Visual references from an array of multi-cultural influences, derived from her upbringing between Miami, Florida, Nassau, Bahamas, and Jamaica inform constructed environments that serve to articulate cultural subjectivities that oscillate between visitor and native roles. Smith’s practice centers on what forms and defines communities of people color, in particular; how they are identified and represented, and how they endure.
Smith’s current works in progress react to a history of representation of people of color by focusing on how identity is constructed and culture is commodified. For Tropical Girls… presents photographic self portraits that question identity constructs and the psychological implications of iconography. Smith’s staged ethnographic survey of invented personas who author their own representations of a blended cultural heritage use her own experiences and recalled memories to create performative studies that empower reclamation of representation and reclaim agency in “performing the other.”
Photographs and videos from the series are presented within contextualizing multi-media installations, creating site specific environments that reference domestic space through cultural signifiers and decor elements recalled from Smith’s own memories of a fluid definition of home, and aim to construct constants within a shifting space that balances precariously between cultures. Using evocative references to plant life, natural phenomena, and tropical locales, these temporary habitats provide familiar points of entry and access to the complex narratives of the subjects depicted.
Smith received a BFA in Photography from S.C.A.D. and an MFA in Photo/Video from SVA, NY. Her work has been included in recent exhibitions at MassArt, Boston, MA, St. John’s University, Queens, NY, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The National Gallery of Jamaica and exhibited at Photoville, NY, Photo NOLA, New Orleans, and Spring Break Art Show, NY. She has presented public art installations in Newark Penn Station through The Gateway Project and Marcus Garvey Park during Flux Art Fair, Harlem and recent solo exhibitions at Space Create, Newburgh, NY and The Wassaic Project, and a forthcoming solo exhibition at Montserrat College of Art, Boston, MA. Tiffany Smith is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.
