serialworks (Kathryn Smith)
This casual arrangement of objects – two black-leather swivel-chairs beneath Robin Rhode’s Sculpture (1998) drawing – was originally photographed to represent Kathryn Smith’s serialworks project space on the web. Converse retools the image as an artwork, following a prompt from longtime colleague and collaborator Josh Ginsburg. Smith and Ginsburg met during the course of her research towards Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance (2009–2010), an exhibition that would go on to include his interactive found-object assemblage The Book of Babel (2009). Ginsburg recognised the potential of this arrangement to continue to stand in for a curatorial ethos and methodology of exhibition-making embodied by the serialworks pseudonym, after it had ceased to operate as a project space in 2012. Here, the photograph rejoins the original chairs in an installation, creating a scenography for critical engagement by recapitulating the playful self-referentiality of Rhode’s drawing. Converse embodies the notion of ‘sightlines’ as a strategy that works against our individual and collective blind spots, where exhibition-making shapes public perceptions of the value of education and knowledge production more broadly.
Est. 2000, Johannesburg
A pseudonym adopted by Kathryn Smith for some of the research-driven curatorial projects she pursues alongside her studio practice, ‘serialworks’ likewise extends the capacity for repetition and storytelling embodied in printmaking (her medium of specialisation) into a self-deprecating appeal to the convening power of the avant-garde. With a sly nod to the obsessiveness of the serial killer, Smith undercuts the self-seriousness of modern curatorial stylistics, investing in encounters between individuals singular in their pursuit of curiosity. Drawing on sociologist Robert Caillois’ notion of the marvelous, she rejects the Surrealists’ fascination with the irrational for its own sake, homing in on the imaginative possibilities that unfold when we encounter the world in its bewildering specificities.
In a brief but productive period between 2009 and 2012, she hosted small and often intimate events at an industrial loft in Woodstock shared with her partner Christian Nerf. These included: the participatory drawing event Group Fax (2009) curated by João Ribas for The Drawing Centre (NY) and Independent Curators International (ICI), the film-screening and discussion event Project 35 (2010) with art historian Susan Hapgood celebrating the 35th anniversary of the ICI, and the / + \ = X (2010) group exhibition curated by Nerf and Spunk Spiekel. More casually, serialworks celebrated the opening of Bili Bidjocka’s FICTION #1: The Autobiography without Form of Bernando Soares (2009) at Goodman Gallery – and hosted ongoing conversations with artistic mentors like Colin Richards and Penny Siopis, and visiting academics like art historian James Elkins. The serialworks archive resides at Atlantic House Studios in Maitland.
