March 10, 2014

Lafayette College Artist-in-Residence Gives Lecture March 12

Trudi Lynn Smith, whose work intersects anthropology, art and curatorial practices in her studies of places and conventions of photography and film is part of Lafayette’s Third Street Artist-In-Residence Program, and the Mapping Meaning Exhibition and Symposium.

Lafayette College artist-in-residence Trudi Lynn Smith, whose work intersects anthropology, art and curatorial practices in her studies of places and conventions of photography and film, will give a talk at noon on Wednesday, March 12 in the Williams Center for the Arts, room 108. The event is free and open to the public.

In her recent artwork, Portable Camera Obscura, she invites participants to re-examine the sites of famous photographs by setting up a portable camera obscura large enough to enter on the Quad from noon to 2 p.m. on Tuesday, March 11, and 2 to 4 p.m. Wednesday, March 12 in Easton’s Centre Square.

Her residency is part of Lafayette’s Third Street Artist-In-Residence Program, which is graciously funded by Amy Smith and the AKS Foundation in conjuncture with the Mapping Meaning Exhibition and Symposium taking place from March 13 to April 19 in the Grossman Gallery in the Williams Visual Arts Building on North Third Street, Easton. The exhibition draws from the work of artists, scientists and scholars who first met while attending five-day experimental workshops in 2010 and 2012. Inspired by a photograph from 1918 depicting an all-female survey crew, Mapping Meaning workshops provide a forum for women to explore questions of mental, social and environmental ecology while in a national park or forest.

Smith holds degrees from Dalhousie University, Emily Carr University and the University of Victoria, Canada. Her interdisciplinary PhD pulls together visual art and anthropology to explore the relationships between photography, archives and protected areas such as national parks and the impact they have on one another. She is particularly interested in bringing together the methods of art practice and social research and published Repeat Photography as Method in Visual Anthropology in Visual Anthropology (2007).

The Mapping Meaning symposium is supported by the Lafayette College Art Galleries and the College’s START initiative, which is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

For more information, contact Karina Skvirsky, assistant professor of art at Lafayette, (610) 330-5826, skvirskk@lafayette.edu.

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Photo courtesy of Lafayette College

Kathleen Parrish
Associate Director of Media Relations
Lafayette College
Communications Division
Easton, PA 18042
parrishk@lafayette.edu
www.lafayette.edu

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