Biography

Nathaniel Smyth makes things that address the limits of our perceptions and the ways in which we make sense of our surroundings and our lives. Smyth is originally from Spring Valley, in southwest Ohio. He received a BFA from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and later relocated to Chicago to complete an MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He now lives and teaches outside of Nashville, Tennessee.
In this work, Smyth uses appropriation and digital imaging to examine how our culture imagines its icons. As many as one hundred or more images are processed together mathematically into a single image, a kind of visual survey to reveal how we depict a figure that we’ve never seen.