Michael Smith A Voyage of Growth and Discovery: One step forward and two steps back For over thirty years, video/performance/installation artist Michael Smith has built an extensive body of work based on two performance personae: Mike, a hopeful innocent who continually falls victim to trends and fashions outside his reach; and Baby Ikki, an ambiguously aged toddler who follows his impulses down unsupervised and often precipitous paths. Both characters are convenient narrative vehicles for Smith to engage the tragicomic aspects of contemporary culture, teasing out facets of loneliness, consumerism, and measures of success and failure. Following the screening of Baby Ikki’s trip to the Burning Man Festival (“A Voyage of Growth and Discovery”, Michael Smith and Mike Kelley, 2010, 87min), Smith will trace the origins of each persona back to the mid-1970s, discussing how feminism, the silent majority, blandness and the media informed their separate and arrested development.
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