'Susan'

Pete Smith came out to Umeå to put together the components of Bedsitter, his pre-exisitng mechanical installations, and to build a new piece for the exhibition at Galleri Andersson/Sandström. The new artwork is called Susan and below is an explanation of the piece by the artist:

"On a visual level, the straight line of the coals is almost like stealing a Richard Long and making it in miniature; the train tracks create a drawn line, as the placement of the track becomes equally as important as any drawn line would be. Landscape and architecture inform my work in many respects. When standing before a piece of Baroque architecture, the really beautiful sculptural elements of the building are hidden from the view at ground level, you see a ledge up high and can only imagine what is beyond. Within the crate portion of Susan there is a sense that the really beautiful aspects are obscured from view, hidden inside the crate.

The train and the crate work in conjunction with each other but also with the surrounding space, and this sense of interaction runs through all my works. The straight line of the railway track and the train attempting to penetrate the crate's exterior, as well as the ambiguous delights that may be hidden inside the opaque crate have led many people directly to a sexual explanation of the piece. However, with all my work, I would reinforce the fact that the artwork is primarily about communication, and sex only becomes a part of this because it is a facet of human interaction. Each of my artworks are about blending the line between the human and the machine - the repetitive and mechanical element involved will always carry sexual undertones, which serves only to add to the human nature of each piece."

--Pete Smith