Multimedia artist Michael Smith joins us for a career-spanning screening of his video works. The program will feature his iconic performance personae, including Baby Ikki, Mike, and the owner of a fictitious lighting design company, as they haplessly navigate their everyday world. The program will also feature a preview of Smith’s 2025 sequel to his dystopic 1985 video Mike Builds a Shelter.
Over the last five decades, Smith’s performance-based practice has included installations, live productions, and single-channel videos. A keen observer and incisive commentator, Smith uses his signature dry humor as a powerful tool for the examination of the false promises made by late capitalism and other driving forces of American culture. Smith often draws on strategies from mass media, appropriating formats like infomercials, television programs, and jingles. His major installation Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter Snack Bar (1983/2023), currently on view at MoMA, addresses the entanglement of postwar paranoia and mass consumption through a painstaking reconstruction of 1980s Americana.
This event coincides with the release of Mike’s Box, an eight-disc DVD collection surveying his video career (co-produced by ARTPIX and Moikai/Drag City.) Following the screening, Smith will be joined in conversation with Stuart Comer, MoMA’s Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance.