Michael E. Smith’s unassuming, poetic sculptures are late capitalist Zen koans: riddles with no answer but which nevertheless spark a moment of satori. For instance, a milk carton covered in mirrors seems to suggest that we are all the lost children. But is this a joke or what? And to what end? The show-stopper is a large foam dice covered with actual bison scrotums. This might sound gimmicky but somehow isn’t. Despite their simplicity, none of these sculptures are easily reduced to a single obvious reading and offer something far more delicate: a collective invocation of absence, negation, and emptiness.
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