TODAY IS YOUR BIRTHDAY
ELI SMITH
March 1 - April 30
Enclosed within ArtCenter DTLA - No Access due to COVID-19 Regulation - Virtual Walkthrough Below
“Today Is Your Birthday” is an inquiry into the labor of both forgetting and remembering across generations.
Five, interconnected rooms trace overlapping family histories across the Atlantic. From the Great Famine in Ireland to the coal mines in Pennsylvania to the daily grind of a modern-day 9 to 5, it all culminates in one event: the birthday. A demarcation of individuality, originally intended as a celebration of survival, the birthday is both the largest and the smallest day of the year. Created through a collaborative process built upon an exchange of individual and shared living histories, "Today Is Your Birthday" asks what it means to survive and thrive in the United States of America.
This series of scripted spaces is a post-immigration story for a post-Trump reality, a rumination on American whiteness, and a reflection on the impulse to position our identities within the mythos of the past. Painstakingly recreated, photo-realistic environments collide with psychological landscapes, stage sets and sculptural elements to form an absurd odyssey of epic proportions, effectively encapsulating two hundred years of events within the minutiae of one simultaneously mundane and exquisitely precious moment.
“Today Is Your Birthday” is ultimately about dangerous play: the addictive process of mythologizing the past, even when doing so obscures the present and undermines the imminent future.
Credits:
Devised and created through supportive exchange with BRD from Love’s Remedies; Soundscapes developed in collaboration with Sound Designer, Avery Orvis; Technical Direction provided by Tom Orvis; Installation support from Christina Valentine, Load in and installation assistance from Tom Orvis, Avery Orvis, and ArtCenter crew.
virtual walkthrough
Enlarge to fullscreen for best experience.
Introduction: The Great Frontier
Conclusion: Surprise!
Chapter One: The Sea & The Sky
Chapter Two: The Farm & The Mine
Epilogue: Surprise Again!
Artist bio
Eli Smith is an artist and activist from Long Island, New York. She received her bachelor’s degree in Physics from the State University of New York at Geneseo and MFAs from CalArts in both Collaborative Performance and Art & Technology. Eli’s current work explores the psychology of precarity through transformative landscapes of potential violence. These imagined environments chronicle the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of the personal narrative in response to cumulative trauma. Her fairy-tale crime scenes suggest that the idea of the self is born through a process of dangerous play. Eli's most recent works are spatial scripts that weave imagined, psychological spaces into painstakingly recreated, photo-realistic rooms. The resulting forms emerge from a practice that is dedicated to exploring new strategies for intimate engagement as part of a feminist methodology for artistic meaning-making. Specific topics of interest include mental illness, class, child abuse, gender identity, trans-generational trauma and the mythos of the American dream. Eli's work has previously appeared at Redcat, the Prague Quadrennial, and The Box. She was a recent artist in residence at Culturehub LA and her previous collaboration with Love's Remedies premiered at the Reef in the summer of 2019. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Website: www.elismith.xyz
Instagram: @eli.smith.now