David Thomas Smith’s photographic series ‘Anthropocene’ was recently exhibited at The Copper House Gallery in Dublin. The photographs are digitally assembled from a large number of Google Earth images which depict some of the world’s most recognizable manmade structures and urban landscapes. The satellite images are then both vertically and horizontally mirrored to create a visually striking tapestry effect. The similarity to a tapestry is reinforced by the large scale of the work and also by the inherent ‘flatness’ of satellite images of the Earth.
Crucially, each location alludes to specific environmental concerns: ‘Three Mile Island’ relates to the threat of a nuclear meltdown, ‘Beijing’ perhaps points to a rise in pollution while the opulence of ‘Las Vegas’ questions our relationship with consumption. Other images equally refer to social problems specific to a place: the urban displacement caused by the Three Gorges Dam or the exploitation of cheap labour in Dubai. These references are produced not necessarily by the image as such, but by an understanding of the place that these images represent.
The title of the project ‘Anthropocene’ is a geological term that describes how human activities have had a significant impact on the Earth’s ecosystems. The images similarly allude to the ecological and social impact of vast manmade structures. As a whole, the project questions man’s ability to create a better and more sustainable world at the cost of dwindling natural resources. Andreas Gursky – in his photograph ‘Beelitz’, 2007 for instance – might be exploring a similar agenda in his vast photographic depictions of landscapes affected by consumption and excess.
Inasmuch as the project relates to ecological and social tensions that rise in parallel to globalization, the mirroring of satellite images also relates to ideological, political and economic power. In the first instance, the project alludes to the power of representation. Satellite imaging and mapping is dominated by Google. To a large extent, our understanding of how the world looks may not be controlled by Google, but it is certainly dominated by the ever-growing economic might by the corporation.
In the second instance, the symmetrical structure of the images divided into quarters also relates to ideological power. Governments and religious institutions have historically tapped into the persuasive powers of symmetry in their architecture. Churches are usually divided into four distinct parts, while dominant symmetrical structures are used to reinforce the ideological authority of the state. An overhead view of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral at St. Paul’s Cathedral recently published in the Guardian vividly illustrates the coming together of visual symmetry and aesthetics, on one hand, with political and religious structures, on the other hand.
This reading of Smith’s work is promoted through images that are neither didactic nor patronizing. The work could be enjoyed for purely aesthetic purposes. Yet it could also be seen to relate to some of he most pressing ecological and social issues of our time.
– Marco Bohr
It is primarily a concern with instances that predominates in the work of David Thomas Smith. The artist’s weighty comments on civilisation and capitalism fuse with subtle articulations on the history and state of photography: indeed, one can begin to observe in works such as Anthropocene and Arecibo, the evolution of humanity mirrored in the progression of photography. Smith is an artist who has recognised these parallels and using an increasingly available archive of imagery, has created work that speaks in cryptic, multifaceted compositions.
In Anthropocene, Smith skilfully weaves multiple digital files harvested from Internet satellite imagery, to create kaleidoscopic rugs of capitalism. Thousands of jpeg images are inverted, rotated and stitched together to form intricately detailed compositions of specific sites of global capitalism. Connecting each individual montage is a carefully considered conceptual thread, an aesthetic of absolute symmetry and a stately palate of colour that alludes to the historical foundations of our most recent societal position.
Exhibited as both prints and light-boxes Smith captures the viewer in his hypnotic prophecy, wherein, like the depictions immortalised within stained glass windows, fact and fiction begin to blur and appear ominously close to our present day actuality.
Taking influence from the narrative carpets of the Afghan and Persian custom, Smith creates elaborate possibilities that stand as a collaboration between age-old tradition, and an increasingly indistinguishable global image of capitalism.
Placing questions of economic reality, capitalist ambition and photographic truth at the heart of Anthropocene, Smith’s pictures appear as vast tableaux that are layered in meaning and dense in visual intrigue. These are the abstract tapestries that tell the story of our day: a binary image that transcends the face of the human to explore the metaphysics of a genus.
Continuing in the vast tableau style of Anthropocene, Smith’s project Arecibo invites the viewer to attend to the role of metaphorical archaeologist. Resembling the ever searching archaeologist, the spectator is drawn into an obscured composition of humanity hidden behind knots of colour and form, waiting to be meticulously unearthed, and slowly understood. Through excavations of fallout colours from the creation of Google Maps, the viewer begins to unravel complex patterns composed of thousands of jpeg images; each composite whole, punctuating a crucial moment in the history of humanity. These extensive, seemingly abstract images commence from the very beginning of human existence, and progress to our relative present where we now find ourselves absorbed in Smith’s forward-looking images of the past.
We see in the first image a section of the ‘Arecibo’ message (a message broadcast into space in 1974) obstructing the estimated site of the origin of man. Through this translucent message we distinguish a vast, fertile plain somewhere on the border between Namibia and Angola; it is a land strewn with lakes, tracks and rivers that emanates with the rich glow of birth. From the lush land of the origin of our race to the burning sands of Mesopotamia and the Islamic golden age, through to a black and white composite image of the surface of the moon entitled Information Age.
Smith meanders his way through humanity’s most central instances with tapestries of civilisation and its milestones, leaving the viewer with a sense of scale, awe and an anxiety of a future yet to come. In all this, Smith is attempting to make sense of the continually expanding photographic archive of humanity. Rich in information and aesthetic absorption, Smith obscures and layers, subverts and removes. He is part of this latest chapter of human history, and from a position very much within the sites he is observing, creates ruptures of visual information that resist photographic categorisation. Smith’s images stand as continually evolving human achievements that both interrogate and celebrate equally; they are the contemporary mosaics of humanity, laced with the artist’s incredulous message.
– Christopher Thomas