The most excellent sculpture I ever built in art school was one I made out of free wood glue and wood scraps from the scrap wood bin. All free, all A+. That’s sort of, in a way, what’s going on here with these newest works of wood and paint magic by Shawn Smith. Plywood, acrylic paint, and sometimes ink. That’s what these masterworks are made of. The heads of animals is what they replicate. The eyeballs of the elite are what they attract.

Your dollars is what they HOPE to attract. Buy them, gallery owners. I must see more! The only way for an artist to have the amount of time it takes to construct these things is if they’ve got the cash to eat dinner! So gallery owners, I say again, support Shawn Smith! This whole wood chippies glued together idea is fantastic!

The gallery below is in chronological order by year. Each year, starting in 2005, there are several works which were produced throughout the year. The gallery is ordered top to bottom, the newest ones at the bottom. Then after the gallery of individual projects, you’re going to see a set of images that all look alike, all of them with buzzards attacking an office. This is the bigger project of Smith’s dealing with these woodies. It’s called Vicious Venue and it’s a total bird attack!

Take a look at some words from Smith on the project:

Vicious Venue My recent work explores my interest in birds of prey as a source of conceptual inspiration and analogy. I am fascinated by vultures and the visceral way most people react to them. For my exhibition at Lawndale Art Center, I asked the question, “What would a digital vulture eat if it was somehow trapped inside this reality?” Vicious Venue is a sculptural installation consisting of a group of life-size pixelated vultures devouring an analog office full of obsolete technologies (like a typewriter, rolodex, and a rotary phone). The viewer becomes an intruder into the space, as if they are stumbling into the middle of the ongoing carnage as the vultures pick the office’s carcass clean. The title of the exhibition, Vicious Venue, refers to the double meaning of “venue” as both a place, and a group of vultures.

Scary. Again Vicious Venue is at the bottom of the gallery in it’s entirety.

To follow the further artworks and designworks of mister Shawn Smith, find him at his portfolio page, the gallery that represents him in Dallas: Craighead Green, or the gallery that represents him in Austin: DBerman Gallery.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies bits category.