James Cameron Smith
Sculptor
James Cameron Smith’s background is in exterior sculptural works installed in public spaces. He has been awarded a wide variety of commissions by numerous organizations and municipalities across Canada. Born and educated in Toronto, Smith received a Bachelor of Arts degree from York University and is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and the O.C.A. New York City Off-Campus Studio. His studio is located near Madoc, Ontario. Smith has received recognition and awards across North America for public art and monumental sculpture work. His diverse practice as a visual artist aspires to contribute to art's critical illuminations of the social, political and cultural.
“My figurative and abstract works explore visual narratives in three dimensional
space. I alter materials in a variety of media to create compelling and significant stories of form, space, and light within culture’s flux. The sculpture “Entropyrrhic” is titled using a word which I coined to meld entropy and pyrrhic and to suggest the disordered extremely slow decay and decline of a plastics system. I
scavenge source material for these sculptures from E-waste which we produce when ABS plastic digital imaging printer and copier carcasses meet their demise through serial obsolescence. The process delves into the ubiquity and diversity of these waste product ABS
materials and their designs. I heat the precision, mechanical E- waste plastics to create sinuous organic deformations which mutate and undercut the original functional mechanical geometries of the plastics. My sculptural transformations express the process of decay and
disorder as well as referring to the challenging afterlife of these materials.
Ever in homage to nature, my conversations with materials celebrate the formative terrains of imagination. I advance materiality to the foreground to celebrate the wealth of possibilities inherent in the poetics of surface and form.”