If God Were to Cast a Shadow, What Would It Be Like?

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Professor Joe Smith Has a “Seriously Perverse” Point of View

If God were to cast a shadow, what would it be like?

That was the question that people walking by Abbey Chapel were prompted to ask when they encountered a recent installation by students in Associate Professor of Art Joe Smith’s Sculpture I class.

Mapped out in yellow plastic survey tape–like the kind used to mark a police line–on the lawn of the venerable edifice was an outline of the chapel and a placard that read: “Step not on the shadow of God.”

The artwork–the product of an assignment calling for tape-wielding students to create a work in conversation with an existing natural or architectural space–was emblematic of Smith's approach to teaching.   

“Students work best when they are asked to think dynamically,” Smith says. “They surprise themselves by the forms that their thinking takes.”

Trained at Rhode Island School of Design, Smith had a variety of work experiences in addition to his years as a working artist–from construction worker and hardware store clerk to cabinetmaker and carpenter, all of which have influenced his own sculptural work. He shows a particular affinity for “unsung” materials like exterior-grade yellow pine, concrete, and cardboard to articulate ideas of permanence and impermanence. He is currently working on large indoor installations using recycled glass and wood.

Smith’s work is widely shown and reviewed; the New York Times has characterized it as being “about relationships that seem at the same time provisional and inevitable  quietly whimsical, seriously perverse.” Citing Smith's media-mixing style, his “flexibility in playing with scale,” and his “tremendously dry sense of humor,” Anthony Lee, associate professor of art, says, “Joe's work meditates on a modernist inheritance, but it goes far beyond that.”

“Joe encourages students to explore all kinds of art and try things that may fail in order to push materials to their limits,” says Mount Holyoke alumna Miriam Janove '06, who took Smith's Sculpture I and II. “As a student, it's difficult to push yourself to create art from your heart and it's much easier to follow an assignment, but Joe doesn't always afford students that luxury. He forces students to come up with their own ideas and follow through, all while lending support and suggestions.”