I decided to research Robert Smithson for my "inspired by a famous artist" piece. All though Smithson is most famous for his Spiral Jetty project, he has also explored various mediums. The medium that I decided to look further into was his "Mirror Displacement" photographs. I am very interested in the medium of photographs and Robert Smithson seems to explore photographs in a way that I never really thought about. Smithson started off with pop art and land art. Later on, Smithson started to get interested in how dump trucks excavated a ton of earth and rock. He then started a series of "non-sites" where he collected earth and rock from areas and then put them in his gallery as sculptures and sometimes combined them with mirrors. Which after a while he started experimenting with Mirror Displacement. In that he took a series of photographs that used mirrors as the main subject. Entropy was a big theme of Smithson, and it showed through much of his artwork and writings. It explored the ideas of decay, renewal, chaos and order. These Mirror displacements were inspired from Smithson's interest in mapping, paradox, language and natural history.
These Mirror Displacements were never supposed to be permanently left where they were, so Smithson decided to photograph them, most of the sites that they were photographed in were places such as landfills, forests and dumps. I was very attracted to his photographs only because they were so much more unique and different than I have ever really seen, and I am very excited about using his photographs as inspiration to experiment with my own photographs
http://www.robertsmithson.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Smithson
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