Audio transcription:
“My name is Todd Smith. I come from Louisville, Kentucky, and I make work about climbing trees that’s conceptually based, and I make work in all different media. It started in college, at Amherst, where I was talking about climbing a minimalist sculpture in class and my professor at the time challenged me to make a work about sharing that unique perspective on the world as wanting to climb things. So my first piece was a video where I strapped a camera to my head and walked in a straight line, and whatever I encountered I would climb. So I was sharing that perspective. It seemed like the people who watched the video most responded to the trees, like there was something from childhood or our ancestry that was intriguing people about climbing trees again. So I focused on, and was more interested myself in climbing trees; I just like to do it. So I continued to push the idea of sharing my perspective of making trees accessible to people who would not otherwise think about climbing trees. I did my whole senior thesis project on that theme, and have not stopped for the last nine years that idea.”
To learn more about Exuvia, visit dublinarts.org/publicart.