REVIEW- Ron Smith

by Stephen Freedman
Ron Smith’s neon aluminum constructions interpret today's socio political landscape in the colors of over-marketed phobic propaganda. In luminous gay procession, uniformed Nazi SS troopers wave across the gallery to levitating Buddhas, stacked three high in flaming pyramid. A naturalistic vista of dissected potato forms (homage to John Koga's severed boulders) offers
context and interstitial tissue to an unnerving, urbane confabulation. Stereotyped icons emerge from a generation of imprinted World War II images, through 60's pop culture clichés in a semiotic parade.

Classic fascism salutes us in the infamous straight-arm heil as street signs in an urban jungle of holocaust memorabilia. Smith's side-stroking SS road worker warns us of invading Buddha consciousness in a postmodern construct of New Age religion. His 'Blest' fire extinguisher pumps out flame.

An illuminated neon Buddha pops up out of line, enlightened or perhaps fully toasted. The haunting shadow of the atomic cloud is three dimensionalized in disturbingly attractive black plastic urns straining the mind in oscillating Gestalt perception.

Ron Smith orchestrates a tragic/romantic narrative in which deep suppressed social fears rise as personal icons -- his insidious luminary street signs warn us, not of upcoming pot holes or hair-pin bends, but of the reemergence of social fascism cloaked as governmental protection, and the deconstruction of our human individuality in the merchandized dissemination of cultural conformity.

	REVIEW


	*Ron Smith* at the Schaeffer International Gallery for the Maui Arts & Cultural Center, in an exhibition of 'Untitled' Recent Works.