Alum Sara Smith 90F Presents Installation at the Hampshire Art Gallery

Sugar Maple Glacial Lake Station by Sara Smith 90F is now on display at the Hampshire College Art Gallery through November 7. The installation is part of a larger multimedia project, Inside The Breath (In Network Time), set in a future era called INT. At the heart of this project are questions about the physical, political, and spiritual implications of understanding humans as part of an interdependent system, with one another, with other species, and within Earth's ecosystems.

Smith developed the core ideas of the INT world by mapping aspects of octopuses’ sensory-perceptual abilities to the writings and ideas of the queer Chicana activist and scholar Gloria Anzaldúa. In INT, bacterial communication networks make our shared existence possible. Smith’s exhibition invites us to consider how we might collectively reach toward a more just, ecological, and actively interconnected existence.

Smith is a transdisciplinary choreographer and librarian. They create speculative-documentary performances and other works that explore interconnection and the poetics and politics of embodied and archival research. Their working process is rooted in physical practices of micro-attention and relational transformation. Their artworks have been seen and heard in theaters, museums, studios, public parks, recreation center basements, and cloud-based platforms. Since 2013, Smith has been the arts and humanities librarian at Amherst College.

There will be a reception celebrating the exhibit and the artist at the Gallery on Friday, October 17, from 5-7 p.m. as part of Hampshire’s 55th Anniversary Celebration in conjunction with Friends and Family Weekend.

Still frame image from Shift Again, 2024. Digital video (11:20). Courtesy of the artist.