rea(l)m w/ S*an D. Henry-Smith
Metro54 presents rea(l)m, the latest edition of SNAPSHOTS, featuring artist, poet and sonic performer S*an D. Henry-Smith. SNAPSHOTS critically engages with, dismantles and/or plays with the concept of the solo exhibition through shared authorship and collaboration. This exhibition and its public programs explore image, text, sound and material excess as a fluid and evolving realm. The artist describes rea(l)m as follows:"Real to reel, real to ream: what collects, makes, rea(l)m, a rendering of attempts, excesses, repetitions, rehearsals as the real thing, on the wall and in a pile, flooding the room. The book becomes a room. The books of this room stack and spill into voice, expelled beyond the wall.”
rea(l)m is realized through improvisation and assemblage, embracing timbral abstraction as well as sound, artworks, voice, performance and sculpture—encompassing a broader concept of rehearsing, publishing and documenting.
Across their practice, S*an centers friends, collaborators and community members, their aliveness, as well as the poetics of their everyday, interior life.
Throughout the exhibition and public program, live improvisations and performances will resonate through Metro54’s walls, creating new connections, iterations or versions in real time. Special guest poets, performers, thinkers and musicians will contribute their voices and artistry toward a poetry album developed over the course of the project.
rea(l)m is an artistic being—bringing together artworks, performances, voices, poems, objects, beings and sculptures from different bodies of thought Henry-Smith has created over the past three years. It provides insight into their expansive, poetic, rhythmic, playful and audacious practice of publishing, broadcasting and sharing—carefully weaving together artistic threads in their work.
Central to rea(l)m is what S*an describes as the imperfect loop, an archive of photographs, poems, vocal and sonic experiments, all bearing a relationship to time, memory and improvisation. At once measured and intuitive responses to immediacy, these elements remain subject to change, embracing nonlinear returns and connections—without nostalgic embrace nor mourned, pained representational pursuits.
rea(l)m will be at Metro54 from February 28 until April 25.
S*an D. Henry-Smith (b. 1992, New York) lives and works in Amsterdam. They are an artist working primarily in poetry and photography, and, by extension, vocal and sonic performance and publishing, engaging black experimental and collaborative practices.