Geoffry Smalley creates theatrical critiques of the people and events that suffuse the public domain. Traditionally, Smalley starts with a source image; photos taken from the public domain that might hint through some discreet detail at subterfuge. This material ranges from photos of Donald Rumsfeld to the benign landscape of Suburbia. Smalley’s painting practice literally takes apart that image. His work spills onto the floor like broken shards; each piece a meticulously painted segment of the discretely disguised whole. His images are the fragments of a narrative, the dismembered found-script, and they leave a viewer to, not just piece together a puzzle, as consider the idea of a deconstructed whole.

Creating a set, Smalley paints the backdrop and builds a topographical stage from the fragmented spillage. The shapes are taken from toys or hobbyist’s model diagrams like those used to assemble model versions of vehicles currently deployed overseas, or from Hot Wheels playsets. Without the detailed assembly instructions, these shapes bleed neatly into one another, a strange camouflage of vehicle and tank parts or pretend cities disguised as scraps of carpet and roads. These sets become a space where the curtain is up on the political theater and attention is drawn to the subtle details that journalism has missed; the stage is unraveling, or disassembling itself, from under foot.

Using carpentry, a workingman’s trade, Smalley conveys a critique of the current American administration through a playful subtlety that evokes the means of critique and parody historically practiced by the working class. Smalley’s cropped and fragmented paintings have a natural way of appearing coded, a TV screen that is picking up only the flickering, disjointed images of unpaid-for cable. Depending on what you’re looking for, if you can figure out the cheat-code, the whole world will either come into focus or self-destruct.







Excerpted from Future FlatWorld by Shannon Stratton