As a thinker and an artist, I have long been fascinated by the astonishing variety of creative expressions humans have explored. Everything created is another language of sorts. In my most recent work, I have endeavoured to create dialogues across time and mediums through collage, drawing, painting, photography, and assemblage.

Within the space of the Greene Gallery, I want to celebrate the fruits of our culture, our arts, our literature, our spirituality. I have created an environment full of quiet conversations between images and objects. I am visiting here, the intersections between culture and nature, dream, memory, and myth. Our own preconceptions about nature create “lenses” through which we see the world. I want to shine light on those preconceptions and open up routes towards new ways of seeing. Perception is always layered with aspects of memory, myth, and dream. These are the intersections which fascinate me.

This work engages in active interventions: moving found objects and images into new spaces or contexts, or fragmenting them. I work with “cultural artifacts”: photographs, diagrams, architectural fragments/ornaments, bells, clocks, tools for charting and measuring, lenses of various kinds ( encouraging the viewer to experience a certain level of “detached objectivity” ). The work invents puzzles & games, it presents objects which seem to be in the process of transitioning into other things. You will find here reconstituted book covers, letter form arrangements, fragments of 18th century hand-written documents and Huguenot hymn books and music manuscripts.

My work explores some of the ways humans deal with what we think we know and the great tug of what we can never know. Some may feel that this gallery has become a "museum in miniature”, a Kunstkammer of sorts. My hope is that you experience it as an opportunity to consider and to contemplate our “ways of knowing”, our own limitations, and our own possibilities.

John Smalley
September 2022