Artist Statement:

Offered up each day, clever moments and lackluster days side-by-side, the 365 Project would be
a remarkable opportunity to explore concepts including absurdity, humor, and social class.
Within the larger story, the project was a regimented experiment, motivated by an interest in selfdiscovery
and identity, a compulsion to imagine and rapidly realize new ideas. Throughout the
year the risk of failure was high, as life inevitably throws curveballs. The Longshot emerged as
an occasion to select and share those images most engaging and poignant from a series populated
by archetypes and symbolic depictions of intricate literary figures, cultural icons, stereotypes,
and often-comical situations.

Biographical Narrative:

Raised on the edge of a farming community, I spent my childhood making drawings of animals
and building cardboard spaceships, my best friend was a dog and my thoughts occupied by
robots, time machines & hours of Thundercats cartoons. In graduate school at Memphis College
of Art my efforts, in the form of abstract prints, embraced the written works of philosophers,
making specific references to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Path, situated on the edge of the French
village of Eze, a fifteen minute bus ride from Nice.

Settling into life in St Louis, my nights and weekends are occupied by renovation projects with
my wife Mary to our tiny Victorian house, raising hound dogs and making absurd painting and
prints, steeped in erroneous nuance. Dutifully by day, I serve as Registrar at the Contemporary
Art Museum St Louis, but from time-to-time, my dreams imagine returning to that twisting
Provençal path to the sea not so far from Nice.

-David Burns Smith