These pixelated animal sculptures by artist Shawn Smith re-imagine creatures found in nature as disintegrated and blocky figures. Smith's ongoing Re-things project blurs the lines between real life and the digital world. The Austin, Texas-based sculptor says, “Specifically, I am interested in how we experience nature through technology. When we see images of nature on TV or on a computer screen, we feel that we are seeing nature but we are really only seeing patterns of pixelated light.”
The sculptures in Smith's collection include animals that the artist has never personally come in contact with in real life. He takes digital images found online and recreates their three-dimensional structures, one block at a time. Using wood, plastic, and metal, Smith constructs his pixelated replicas with a myriad of often self-dyed components. In the end, the pieces include a wide spectrum of colors, some of which one would not normally include, that are not always one concrete entity. They are often fragmented. For this, Smith explains, “Through the process of pixelation, color is distilled, some bits of information are lost, and the form is abstracted.”
