Commentary by Johan Maurer, Editor, Crane MetaMarketing

“Rites of Asylum” is based on Smith Eliot's photography and research at the former Dammasch State Hospital, a sister institution to the one at which the film version of the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was made.
The first room of the gallery displayed the full-size photos. As you look around at those photos, you become aware that there's another room from which people are quietly emerging. Looking closer, you see a small bed, an artifact from Dammasch, with snakes writhing out from under the bed, spreading through the metal webbing and climbing up the walls, while other snakes come down through the ceiling. The snakes (and Smith's dress) are made from Dammasch curtain fabric. These three-dimensional details amplify the human dimension eerily echoing through all the photos, refusing to be pacified by the orderly pages of hospital manuals and inspection reports plastering the cell walls.

I last saw my sister Ellen in December 1969, during her incarceration at the Illinois State Psychiatric Instite. Three months later she "eloped" (in the language of the incident reports plastered on Pushdot's walls), only to be killed on the Calumet Canal Bridge a few days later. She was killed with a sawed-off shotgun by a man who nevertheless, according to Anthony Bloom, bore somewhere within him the image of God. Smith's images shimmer with the power of incongruity: the silent marks and debris of human institutionalization and involuntary restraint, as seen through intensely human eyes. Savage ironies abound, but are noted quietly, allowing shared humanity to witness what a more manipulative presentation would simply exploit.

Pinned to a sheet of care standards, an inmate's note in crayon: "Content in Tues. There but in His grace go I. Overcome evil w/good. Jesus knows me."
November, 2006

Commentary by Brian Eugene Snipes

Smith Eliot exhibit at Pushdot gallery [02 Nov 2006|11:57pm]

Those who have been touched by mental hospitals* will see Eliot's Dammasch exhibit unbarred from the normal posture one finds at gallery showings. The exhibit had about 5 hanging photos and an album to look through that many people were flocked around. The print quality in the book was wonderful, they appeared to all be hand printed on a pearl finish quality paper (that was my view over many shoulders).

One image that transplanted me immediately to the scene was one of curtains blowing out from a window, feelings evoked being departure of fourth dimensional existence and a spiritual signal of a soul in Dammasch. That's "of a soul" not from a soul: a collective.
H.P. Lovecraft would have been proud of the monster living in the side room Smith put together. There were crayola devotions to Jesus and the entire room had been produced from found items, including the monster that was sewed together. How could one devoke this monster of anxiety, loneliness, and imprisionment of mind and body? A shadow of fear with colorful arms in mental electricity and chemical fern gully.

I had a small bouquet for Eliot that I left on my way to the gallery, I was unsure if it would be accepted in the right light. I felt she had turned away from something recently, or someone, and figured it could have very well been worsened by displaying my poetic zeal for her.

Meeting Smith was poetic still without effort, I approached her soaking wet and having never met in person she greeted me by name. She was very warm and transparent, even in pouring me a "double" of red wine. When I got squeezed nicely on departure I knew whatever artistic walls of protection I built had been demolished by the energy she possesses.