In this exhibition, Rob Smith, as usual, explores the corrupted grammars of interference. Where many systems collide, unpredictable, seemingly supernatural events often occur. On the night of November 10, 1975, one such event inhaled the loose threads of many systems: wind, water, commerce, and workers' lives.
A rogue wave, a destructive and nearly unpredictable phantom of deep waters, is often blamed for the sinking of a steel industry freight ship in Lake Superior, a tragedy which took the lives of 29 workers. Borne out of the noise of unstable wave action, the rogue wave is a case in constructive interference. In the case of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" this non-linear "psychosis" of the deep turned destructive, and a vast aporia of scientific understandings of weather, cultural logics, and human life manifested itself in a true underscoring of the word's Greek root: non-passage.
In a tribute to the lives of the workers lost in this and other catastrophes where the cold logics of commerce and nature collide, Smith brings together interfering wave frequencies of pattern, color, and light to triangulate with Gordon Lightfoot's own tribute to the tragedy in song.