About the Artist

b. 1980 Ireland, based between Dublin and Glasgow. Aaron Smyth completed Ba fine Art National College of Art and Design in 2015 and City & Guilds Diploma New Media Technology College. IRE in 2008.

Smyth’s practice deals with identity or more precisely, the way in which identity arises.

It explores how our experience is visually coded within systems of power and how these codings in-turn shape us. His work does this by bringing together disparate imagery, fragments of society, distorting and contrasting them to build a grand narrative of interwoven references. Visually the work draws from Art History, Cinema, Cultural Reference and Archive, weaving them together, re-contextualising present knowledge with the past to construct a world suspended between the real and the subconscious, a silhouette of the time and mutual truth that is timeless.Smyth’s work unravels these personal and cultural signifiers in all their complex and contradictory trappings, investigating them as a site of rupture, a totem, a ‘radical realism’. At some moments the work finds a harmony, a symmetry, at other times the work stands adjacent to it’s own elements, this difficulty within the work speaks to the difficulties within ourselves, our contradictions and truths that exist cradled between our realities and fictions.