Shauna Le Ann Smith
I am an artist exploring the partnership of artmaking and community engagement. The core function of my practice is nurturing meaningful connections between people and within oneself, which motivates the ways I work within the public and create art objects. A question central to my work is, “What is it we can do? What is possible here?”. With these questions in mind, I explore ways of responding to both internal and external experiences, locations, and conditions through transdisciplinary practices.
Themes of slowness and interconnection carry through my work. The use of subtlety in my two-dimensional work encourages viewers to slow down, as the imagery becomes visible only through durational observation. Slowness is also integral to my socially engaged work as I facilitate intimate hour-long public experiences of silence and conversation. These meditative qualities allow participants to delve into moments of introspection, providing a much-needed counterbalance to the fast-paced visual culture and habits prevalent in modern-day America.
Together, my social practice and object-based work reveal and re-imagine ways to connect and slow down, with others and ourselves.
Artist Biography:
Shauna Le Ann Smith is an artist currently living and working in Springfield, Missouri. She received her MFA and BFA from Missouri State University in 2016 and her AFA from East Central College in 2014. Exploring the relationship between artmaking and community building, Shauna uses interdisciplinary practices to create site-responsive work which takes the shape of gatherings, objects, spaces, or relational forms. A question central to her work is, “What is possible here?”. Smith has conducted several social practice projects including Slow Viewing (2019-current) and How We Are Feeling (2020). She co-founded Lawn Art With Neighbors (2020-current) in collaboration with Deidre Argyle and Jodi McCoy. She has co-curated several exhibitions including Mapping Awareness: Social Objects and Detritus at the Carolla Arts Exhibition Center (2022), Socially Distanced at Brick City Gallery (2021), and was an invited co-curator in Humanities, Vol I at the Springfield Art Museum (2022). She has had several solo exhibitions including Continuing (2023, Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, MO), Requests for Slowness and Patience (2022, Bentley Gallery, Springfield, MO) and On Life and Death (2019, Rosette Studios, Springfield, MO), and has participated in several national group exhibitions. Her work has been published in Soft Quarterly and Slag Mag.