Yvette Kaiser Smith
Lake Street 1459c (2019)
digital pigment print on transparency film, laser-cut acrylic, graphite, nylon spacers, mixed hardware
17.5 x 23.5 x 2.5 in. | $3,100
Sitting in rush hour traffic, often just before entering or many times within an underpass, I began noticing Chicago’s geometry, and then framing geometric abstraction in square and rectangular formats from the driver’s seat of my truck. As an extension of this ongoing series dubbed Random Acts of Urban Geometry, I developed an obsession with Lake Street and the extreme vanishing point anchored by the elevated Green Line tracks.
A 4-person photo-based exhibition titled Borders at UIMA was the impetus behind my first body of work with photographic images. In addition to the physical and conceptual borders captured within the image itself, I approached the concept of borders from a place of memory. Photos as souvenirs; structural memory of supports that elevate the track, a repetition of nested brackets created by evenly spaced posts.
Probably because, as an artist, I have processed hundreds if not thousands of 35mm slides, photographs as records of inventory, and that the iPhone image files limit scale of possible print, and that, at the time, I was working with laser-cut acrylic, reference to film and slide mounts became the starting point of presentation for this project. As artists, no matter where we go (within our studio practice) there we are. As a sculptor, I needed to push these, just over the line, into the realm of sculptural objects, not simply framed photographs. To further integrate the print with its acrylic housing, varying corner radii of the image window, drawn line, and narrow strip of frosted clear acrylic that partially covers the image bring various aspects of Lake Street 1459c out of the frame and into the frame.
© Yvette Kaiser Smith