Banner artwork: Life by Mickey Smith, from the Volume series of photographs.
About the artist: Mickey Smith was born in 1972 in Duluth, Minnesota and received a B.A. in Photography from Moorhead State University in 1994. Images from her Volume series have shown in galleries and museums throughout the United States and are included in the collections of the Weisman Art Museum and Fidelity Corporate Art Collection. Smith is the recipient of the McKnight Artist Fellowship for Photography and a Forecast Public Art Affairs grant. A number of Smith's photographs are included in the exhibition, Unabridged, at Traffic Zone Center for Visual Art in Minneapolis, which closes April 15. Get the latest news and information on upcoming shows around the country by visiting the artist's website.
About the Volume series, Smith writes:
"Volume is an ongoing project documenting bound periodicals and professional journals in public libraries. Most of these publications are being replaced by their online counterparts, and in many cases the printed versions are no longer bound. Several titles photographed in the process of this project have been removed from the stacks due to space and budget constraints. Searching endless rows of these utilitarian texts, I am struck by the physical mass of knowledge and tenuousness of printed works as they fade from public consciousness. The act of hunting for and photographing these objects is fundamental to my process. I do not touch, light, or manipulate the books and words – preferring to document them as found in the stacks, created by the librarian, and positioned by the last unknown reader. The irony and graphic quality of repeating titles fascinate and draw, no matter how mundane, from known to obscure, from Vogue to Blood. I focus on simple, provocative titles that transcend the spines on which they appear."