The Arts House Trust - Mickey Smith: Morphologies

Mickey Smith (US/NZ) is an award winning conceptual artist and photographer. For over two decades, her practice has been engaged with a longstanding inquiry into libraries, books and archives — in particular the social significance of their physical existence or disappearance.

Smith’s photography is a striking and poignant reflection of human history through her documentation of simple, provocative titles found on library shelves and most recently, second hand book stores around the world. Her work continuously explores the state of entropy within libraries, as we witness information systems shift, digitize and collections become deaccessioned.

Morphologies presents insights through work from her long-form documentary Volume, plus highlights from Denudation, As You Will: Carnegie Libraries of the South Pacific and new installation-based artworks. From chained libraries to digitisation, deaccessioning and artificial intelligence, Morphologies asks us to consider our evolving relationships with books and the institutions that shape our collective cultural memory.