Bio: Doug Smith

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Doug Smith was educated at the University of Manitoba in the Fine Arts Diploma Program. He majored in ceramics and continued as a sculptor in clay for several years, participating in group and solo exhibitions throughout Manitoba and the USA. Smith has works - past and present - in several corporate and private collections, including the collections of Manitoba Hydro, Great West Life, Manitoba legislature, Blue Cross Canada as well as the Manitoba and Canada Art Banks. His work has been exhibited in several galleries including, The Sculpture Center in Cleveland, Burke University in Ohio, the kunsthal in Rotterdam and Plug In ICA in Winnipeg.

In 1996 - 2001, Smith moved from Canada to Cleveland and Rotterdam. It was during his time in Rotterdam that he re-aligned his artistic practice towards drawing. The trajectory of his current drawing practice was greatly influenced by The Netherlands; a geologically vulnerable country whose history encompasses centuries of expansive mercantile entrepreneurship and superhuman engineering projects, yet also a historically mono-cultural country wrestling with contemporary immigration challenges. What initiated from this period, for Smith, was an experimental, diagrammatic-based art that probes the concept of human transmigrations. He places the optics not upon one particular country or city, but on the world stage, inferring the realm of a collective psyche. He utilizes a visual set of self-derived codes, symbols and images that are re-contextualized throughout an ongoing suite of narrative- based drawings; a project that would be brought to fruition after his return to Canada. In Winnipeg, he attained Winnipeg, Manitoba and Canada Art Council grants to work upon an on-going and large-scale drawing project. This work will be configured into public exhibitions at aceartinc. in Winnipeg in 2012, continuing to the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba in 2013.

Within the last few years, Smith began experimenting in a separate genre of visual narratives in what he terms "collage/paintings". This work is comprised of hand-cut paper on wood panels with applications of colour and clear gloss coatings; providing a more arbitrary and playful approach to image building. Though Smith initially began this work, through a desire to take necessary and periodic breaks from his predominantly graphite drawing projects, he has embraced this process-driven work as another avenue to disseminate his invented narratives. He currently maintains his studio in Winnipeg where he is represented by Gurevich Fine Arts.