Philip Smith’s artwork is created through a process that combines photography, drawing, and painting.  His language of mark-making and imagery comes from a vast archive of 35mm film negatives that the artist uses to record diagrams, illustrations, and symbols appropriated from disparate cultural sources such as 1950s Cold War spy manuals, lost magic books, lingerie ads, and numerology charts.

Smith covers the surface of the canvas with layers of wax or a gesso medium, providing a dense surface onto which he first draws out the work with oil pastel then deconstructs his mark thorough a process of erasure. At once evocative and yet deeply alien, Smith’s work conjures the potential of these pictorial fragments through a deft handling of pigment, surface, and scale to evince the presence of the unknown and unseen.