The portrait of Steve Benjamin, the Columbia mayor, looks like himself, only there’s something really different about him, about his image. Walking closer to the framed portrait of Benjamin, one notices Benjamin’s image is comprised of cell phones, remote controls, computer keys and combs.
“I tried not to do as many toys in the Steve Benjamin because I wanted it to be more sophisticated,” said Kirkland Smith, the artist who created the Benjamin portrait. “But there are a lot of electronics.”
Smith, who creates representational paintings — yes, she considers them paintings — with the post-consumer waste items she’s collected, will exhibit her work today through Oct. 15 at Gallery 80808. “Re-Created” will feature Smith’s assemblages like the one of Benjamin, which does have a few toys — doll parts, a cat — hidden in the maze of CD cases and bottles caps.
“And there’s a rat in one of his ears, but I’m not making a statement,” Smith said.
“At all,” she added firmly before continuing. “I really look for color. I try to get the values right to get the color, the likeness. Toys are my best range of values. They come in all different shades.”
Benjamin will be joined by portraits of a beautiful, fair-skinned Marilyn Monroe, a vibrant Bob Marley and even a crying Indian.
Transforming trash
Smith likes to work with junk that has no place to go.
A classical painter, she began making assemblages, the process of making three-dimensional art with found objects, when she entered an environmental landscape contest a few years ago. To create an image of a boy, she gave friends a list of what she needed and asked them to save the items for one week.
“So every day, I got a little bag of trash,” Smith said. “I created this piece, and I had a lot of stuff left so I continued.”
Smith presented a piece at a DHEC conference, and was told that almost nothing on it was recyclable. (This reporter learned that the caps on bottled water can’t be recycled.)
“Most of the stuff I work with, and I didn’t realize this when I started, goes into the landfill,” she said. “It isn’t recyclable. There’s only certain plastic things that you can recycle.”
On one side of Smith’s space at Vista Studios it looks like the room of a kid who has everything. There are bins on the floor filled with discarded soldiers, horses and dolls. The bins on the shelves hold wine corks, bottle tops, plastic eggs and aluminum pop tabs that Smith sorts by color.
On the other side of the room there’s what looks like a donation pile waiting to be dropped off at Goodwill.
“Some of this stuff Goodwill doesn’t want,” Smith, a mother of four who is married to Rep. James Smith, D-Richland, said. “The piles have been growing. I haven’t had time to sort it.
“People have been very, very generous going through the trouble of saving stuff for me, bringing it down to my studio a lot of times. Or they drop it off at my house.”
Smith even has colorful plastic rings, the part that separates from a bottle top after the seal has been broken with a twist.
“The people that save those, they go the extra mile because they are a pain to take off,” she said. “To get that ring off takes time.”
Finding perspective
On a visit to Smith’s studio last week, she was on her knees gluing pieces on “The Crying Indian.” She said she was reworking his mouth, but standing over the piece, one couldn’t make out the image as easily as Benjamin’s. That’s the thing with Smith’s assemblages: if you stand too close, the portrait is lost to the components. In the Indian’s case, it’s dinosaurs, horses in various browns, Simba and a young Obi-Wan Kenobi.
“Yeah, I have a lot of ‘Star Wars’ characters in my work,” Smith said. “So I do end up using a lot of toys. I use a lot of other things, too.”
Like a vacuum cleaner hose, a nozzle for an outdoor hose, a spatula and telephones. The feathers of the Indian’s headdress are made from white plastic knives. Now it’s coming into focus; he really does look like the Indian, in the Keep America Beautiful commercial that ran in the early ’70s, the one who cries when trash is thrown at his feet. That’s the moment she captures in “The Crying Indian.”
This is Smith’s first solo show. This summer she participated in “REBUS” at anastasia and Friends. Rebus is a device that uses pictures to represent words, and Smith presented an image of someone talking trash.
When you’re on the street, if you take the time to look around, you’ll probably see some trash. Unfortunately, people aren’t talking about it much. But Smith is.
“I wanted to just talk about an issue that directly affected just normal people — me in my daily life,” she said. “I’m not an expert. I don’t know all of the facts, but I can make a statement with my art.”
For the opening tonight, Smith will wear a dress made of pop tabs. (She and friend Liz Melendez won a craftsmanship award at this year’s Runaway Runway, the fashion show of recycled goods.) Smith will look sort of like one of her assemblages.
Both need to be seen in person.
“If you see it in a photograph, it’s hard to really get a sense of how big they are or the stuff that’s in them,” Smith said about her art. “I think the further back you step, the less I want you to see the stuff, the more I want the painting to come into focus so that it will look like a painting.”
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