about
Kaitlyn Jo Smith's interdisciplinary studio research examines the socioeconomic impact that emerging technologies have on America's working class. She pays homage to laborers by highlighting the specific ways in which technology renders invisible the labor that produces it. Drawing on her rural upbringing and youth spent in the Rust Belt during the Great Recession, Smith's practice explores the intersections between work and worship, as well as the ways in which humans become indoctrinated into lives of monotony. Through both traditional photographic means and the implementation of automated technologies and machine learning, her practice challenges the authority of algorithms while fostering a dialogue around humankind's current and future relationship to work.
Smith's projects have shown nationally and internationally. She is the 2023 recipient of the Alice C. Cole '42 Fellowship in Studio Art, was longlisted for the 2021 Lumen Prize in Art and Technology (London) and received the College Art Association's Services to Artists Committee Award for her video Lights Out. Smith has been featured in PDNedu, Art IDEAL, and Al-Tiba9 Magazine. She has presented her work at FEMeeting: Women in Art, Science & Technology, Technarte International Conference on Art and Technology, and Homecoming, Society for Photographic Education Annual National Conference.
Smith's work has shown nationally and internationally at the Tucson Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, Arizona, Split Videoart Festival in Croatia, CICA Museum in South Korea and BIOs in Athens Greece. She was longlisted for the 2021 Lumen Prize in Art and Technology (London), presented at Technarte Conference (Bilbao), selected as Art Connect's June Artist to Watch, and received the College Art Association's Services to Artists Committee Award for her video Lights Out. She has also been featured in PDNedu and Al-Tiba9 Magazine (Barcelona).
