Artist Statement: Exploring rupture, repair and the climate of internal place, Lauren Dana Smith’s multidisciplinary practice represents the linkages between body, land, collective trauma and memory. 

Smith’s feminist approach tests the personal boundaries we choose and those we don't. Her sculptural painting series, digital objects, video/sound installations and writings forge inquiries into the impact of personal and collective trauma and transformative experience on the psyche. Each work considers the bodily experience of the land and the mirror it provides to us in times of calm and times of chaos. 

Smith’s work ultimately invites a path through our intimate interior spaces and along the exterior boundaries of physical form. At play is a steady tension between our inner landscapes and outer environments.

Interested in honoring the depth and narrative of the American Southwest and its parallels to personal and ancestral memory through a contemporary lens, Smith’s work analyzes color, texture, climate and existential presence in a departure from the familiar iconography of traditional Southwestern art.