Is your mind playing tricks on you? Are you trapped inside a video game? Texas-based Shawn Smith is a modern-day sculptor who likes to explore “the slippery intersection between the digital world and reality.” Over the past few years, he’s been taking small pieces of wood, plastic, and metal and arranging them together to form objects in nature. “I am very interested in how intertwined humans have become with digital devices,” he says. “I think the lines are becoming increasingly blurred. I find this to be a playground ripe with multiple interpretations.”
Why did Smith start down this path? “I have always been interested in small things making up larger things,” he tells us. “I made my first pixelated sculpture in 2005 while I was in my last year of graduate school. I was born the year of Pong (1972) and I have had video games and home computers around me at an early age. I became increasingly interested in the depiction of objects and nature on a screen. I began asking myself what would happen to a recognizable form if it was translated from a screen in to three dimensions.”
It should come as no surprise that Smith’s work has spread far and wide on websites and blogs. How could you not love something that twists your sense of reality?
