Josh Smith was born in 1976 in Okinawa, Japan, where his father served in the U.S. military, and grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. His first major gallery shows, in the early aughts, featured abstract paintings that largely incorporated what he has called his “exaggerated American name.” His works often build upon his previous projects, sometimes literally: new paintings rendered directly on top of the old. In Dinosaurs, a series of digital artworks made for the Review, he collages intensely saturated lithographs and monotypes with photographs of small-scale resin sculptures—palm trees, felines, and extinct reptiles made of seashells, pine cones, toothpicks, wire, and wood. 

 

—AG

 

 

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All photographs by Farzad Owrang, courtesy of Josh Smith.