Kim Abeles - The Smog Collectors

Kim Abeles - The Smog Collectors

project link: http://www.kimabeles.com/artPages/smog.html

The London Globe printed a new word, "Smog," coined in a speech at the 1905 Public Health Congress. They considered it a public service to describe this phenomenon. Eighty-eight years later we posess, yet avoid using, the technology to correct 95% of the pollution legacy.

Kim Abeles - The Smog Collectors

The Smog Collectors materialize the reality of the air we breath. They achieve thier potency most effectively when the image contradicts thier substance. Thus, my process ia a private retaliation brought to public attention.

Kim Abeles - The Smog Collectors

I place stencil images on transparent or opaque materials, then leave these on the roof of my studio and let the particulate matter in the heavy air fall upon them. When the stencil is removed, the images reveal themselves. To quote a stranger, they are "footprints of the sky." Since the worst in the air can't be seen, Smog Collectors are both literal and metaphoric depictions of the current conditions of our life source. They are reminders of our industrial decisions: the road we took that seemed so modern.

Kim Abeles - The Smog Collectors

Presidential Commemorative Smog Plates 1991 Portraits of U.S. Presidents from McKinley to Bush, created from smog with their historical quotes about the environment and business. Plates were left out at varying lengths of time depending on the president's environmental record.

Kim Abeles - The Smog Collectors


artist bio
Kim Abeles is an artist who crosses disciplines and media to explore and map the urban environment and chronicle broad social issues. The Smog Collector series brought her work to national and international attention in the art world, and mainstream sources such as Newsweek and Dan Rather.

Abeles' mid-career survey, Encyclopedia Persona A-Z, toured the United States and South America, and was awarded the Best Regional Museum Show category for 1993-94 by the International Association of Art Critics.

She represented the U.S. in both the Fotografie Biennale Rotterdam and the Cultural Centre of Berchem in Antwerp. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the United States Information Agency, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and is archived in the library collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt Publication Design Collection of the Smithsonian.

Abeles was awarded grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation and Peter Norton Foundation and fellowships from J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, Pollack-Krasner Foundation, and the California Arts Council.