For Last Departure, artist Lenard Smith developed a process to create what he calls “proposals” for structures in the form of assemblage models, photographs, and preliminary sketches. The goal was to reimagine how built structures, if not physical space itself, could be conceived, visualized, and, ultimately, experienced.
The project considers architectural models as a design tool—and an intimate mode of exploration. Smith builds each sculpture by hand before taking an inquiry-based approach to photographically documenting them in his studio. That method intuitively asks: What happens when the angle from which the camera views the subject shifts? How does a spatial form transform because of those adjustments in perspective? The resulting monochromatic images resemble the still life genre, while also revealing the artist’s grounding in Surrealist strategies and visual reference points from African Brutalism.
By creating models to be looked at through photography, Smith’s work resonates with what remains of models created in the 1920s by VKhUTEMAS students, which he discovered in the school’s archives at the Getty Research Institute. He was fascinated with the documentation photos—and then stunned to learn that the models can only be experienced through those images as the original materials were destroyed. Last Departure works in the space of that absence, thinking through the relationships between architecture and photography, asking how the latter’s visuals present opportunities, if not innovations, for reconsidering how spatial forms can be perceived.
Last Departure expands conceptual understandings of VKhUTEMAS through a critical dialogue about its pedagogy with architect and historian Anna Bokov, PhD, the leading scholar of the school, presented alongside Smith’s art. The conversation demonstrates how architecture and art can inform one another in profound ways. The echoes of VKhUTEMAS as a utopian social project not only provide an inspiration for Last Departure, but also serve to activate Smith’s underlying concern for re-envisioning how spaces for everyday life, especially for communities of color, can be lived.
