Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Drawing, Sound, Installation, Collage
Website: waynesmith.studio
Wayne Smith is a San Francisco-based visual and sound artist who has worked across drawing, collage, installation, and scanner-based imagery. He earned a BA in painting and an MA in sculpture from San Jose State University, and has lived and worked in San Francisco throughout his career.
Smith has shown with Gallery 16 in San Francisco since the mid-1990s, beginning with the two-person exhibition Rex Ray & Wayne Smith in 1996 and continuing through solo presentations in 2010, 2011, and 2013, and the group exhibition The Mystery Of The Mystery with Rebeca Bollinger and Scott Hewicker in 2024. In 2022 he presented Come On, Let’s Go at Et al. etc. in San Francisco, an installation that gathered seven years of wood pieces, clay coordinates, and paper markers into a single recomposed arrangement. Kenneth Baker reviewed his Gallery 16 work for the San Francisco Chronicle, writing that in Smith’s art “seriousness masquerades as accident, rote performance and emotional indifference.”
His work is held in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He has been an Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito and a resident at Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga. Alongside his visual practice he has made field recordings for decades, assembling them into compositions beginning in the late 1990s; these became the first release of his music and sound project Aero-Mic’d in 2001. He scored the soundtrack for D-L Alvarez and Kevin Killian’s film The Visitor Owl, screened at SFMOMA in 2012.
Repetitive drawing is the spine of Smith’s visual work. His recent pieces are small grids of ruled ballpoint pen ink – black, blue, and occasional red – laid onto blocks of found hardwood, an approach he treats as plotting rather than depiction. Because the grain of the wood is uneven and unpredictable, the ruled line deviates; the instability of the surface guarantees that mistakes will occur, and the finished block becomes a timeline of its own imperfect making. The marks seem to merge with the grain, giving the works a vibratory, moire-like optical quality at a scale of only a few inches.
The same logic governs his sound work: repetition, overlapping fields, and the deliberate exploitation of accident. Aero-Mic’d combines field recordings with live improvisation and digital manipulation, performed with Cliff Hengst and Scott Hewicker at venues including Meridian Gallery and Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and the Schindler House in Los Angeles. Across both bodies of work, Smith sets up a disciplined, almost clerical procedure and then lets material resistance and chance introduce the variation – drawing, as one exhibition essay put it, as a form of scoring.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.