Pure Breed Or Mutt, 2024.
Found house paint,Tape and Plastic on Found Canvas drop sheet
170cm x 145cm
New & Used 100mph, 2024
Duct Tape on Found PVC
200cm x 200cm
BIO:
Joel Izak Smith (b.1999) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working between Sydney and London. His practice focuses on the intersection of endurance and degradation in found, fine, and repurposed materials or objects.
Through surface treatment and a process of layering, his work evokes fragmented narratives, reflecting societal pressures surrounding youth, identity, and the emotional scars carried from childhood into adulthood.
Smith explores the beauty of human error and decay, utilizing found or ready-made objects to highlight the tension between consumerism, class struggle, and the search for peculiarity in an age of countless filters.
CV:
_Waverley Art Prize Finalist, Sydney Australia, 2024
_It Was Written, Exhibition with
Wade Kelly, Sydney Australia 2023
_Belle Artstart Finalist, Sydney Australia, 2020
STATEMENT:
My practice reveres the enduring, while highlighting the inevitable degradation of found, fine, and repurposed materials. Through surface treatment, I explore how objects like people carry the wear of time, creating layers of meaning that seek, but often fail to translate one another .
I intent to mirror the societal pressure to preserve the fragility of youth while addressing the loss of innocence that arrives too early. The process of layering reflects the emotional scars left from your childhood, creating a different response to the world in adulthood. These are the narratives that speak through his use of materials and colour palettes, echoing the tension between protection and exposure, beauty and decay.
The work reflects the discourse of human behaviour in the age of digital identity ; how we hoard personas, treat surroundings or others in them, project meaning, and the ever slipping grasp for individuality. Society pushes us to attach significance even where none is intended, a compulsion explored through the imperfect human traces left in my work. These traces are both deliberate and accidental, exposing the beauty of human error and its touch as we lose ourselves in objects once meant to comfort like phones, teddy bears, and other symbols of innocence that are now inadequate and or miss-used.
By using ready-made objects as brushes, stamps, and tools on found materials and or fine art materials, it reverbs the disposable nature of consumerism, touching on class struggle, learnt copping mechanisms, forgotten narratives in modern times. In the way the work hopes you too love the "ugly ducklings" of both material and human nature, it too confronts the uncomfortable, and to reflect on what is lost and gained through the works.