Friday, February 7, 2014

Deleta Smith Artist Statement

I am an accidental artist. 

I have always considered myself a creative but never an artist until I was introduced to Photoshop and Illustrator. The following quote by E.B. White would make the perfect accompanying placard to my work, 

“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” 

What I create illuminates the tension expressed within this idea: enjoying the world and fixing it. I find a subject and focus on what makes it both sublime and uncanny. My work has shown an appreciation of fashion while simultaneously shining a light on the industries unrealistic expectations of women’s bodies. I have explored the beauties of my home country Belize as well as  the ugliness of sex tourism there. 

I am strongly influenced by everyday heroes and heroines: military members, student activists, immigrant families, the struggling designer, the urban farmer, my mother who raised 7 children on her own.

My work is both personal and communal. It almost always addresses my Blackness, my femaleness, my Belizean heritage and my New York City home. I am positively and negatively trapped by these categories and my work can not exist without them. 

I have created and consumed digital media since my adolescence.  It is strangely organic that my work tends to take this form. It is the way that I see, explore and express my changing world.

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