From Lucid Stead

By Phillip K. Smith III

The exhibition From Lucid Stead: Prints and Works by Phillip K. Smith III is on view at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, from March 18 through September 13, 2019. It is inspired by Lucid Stead, Smith’s 2013 installation in Joshua Tree, CA. To create Lucid Stead, he transformed an existing homesteader shack into a mirrored structure that, by day, reflected the desert surroundings (as seen in the photograph) and, by night, shifted into a color-changing projected light installation.

Smith creates large-scale temporary installations drawing on concepts of space, form, light, shadow, environment, and change. His practice is informed by his architecture training at Rhode Island School of Design. His works include The Circle of Land and Sky (2017) at the inaugural Desert X in the Sonoran desert; Open Sky (2018), in Milan’s 16th-century Palazzo Isimbardi; and Detroit Skybridge (2018), commissioned as part of Detroit’s Library Street Collective’s revitalization effort. Producing extraordinary and communal encounters via installations that explore the transitory nature of light, Smith fosters inexpressibly human, immaterial, and unifying experiences that elude language and defy form, but can be undeniably felt.

Through his pacing of color, reflection, and use of the environment as material, Smith encourages us to slow down and observe our surroundings in new ways. Visit the artist’s website here: https://www.pks3.com/.