Aaron Smyth
Aaron Alexander Smyth is an Irish artist working between Dublin and Glasgow. His practice deals with identity or, more precisely, the way in which identity arises. His work explores how our experience is visually coded within systems of power and how these codings in turn shape us. By bringing together disparate imagery and fragments of society, his work distorts and contrasts them to build a grand narrative of interwoven references, unraveling personal and cultural signifiers in all their complex and contradictory trappings, investigating them as a site of rupture, a totem.
At some moments the work finds a harmony, a symmetry, at other times the work stands adjacent to its own elements, this difficulty within the work speaks to the difficulties within ourselves, our contradictions and truths that exist cradled between our realities and fictions.
Smyth graduated from The National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2015 with a First class honours degree with distinction and the 1st prize graduate award from Graphic Studio Dublin. He has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally with works held in public and private collections. He has been awarded Artist-in-Residence positions alongside GUM Collective in The National Gallery of Ireland, The Royal Hibernian Academy and The Black Church Printmakers. During this time he has also been the recipient of the Mary Cawley Bursary, and the D-LightBLOW PhotoAward and the STEP Grant from the European Cultural Foundation and Compagnia di San Paolo.
Instagram: @plasticyouth