A Mahler & LeWitt Studios commission for the facade of Casa Menotti in collaboration with Fondazione Monini, supported by The Goldstone Family Foundation. Curated by Federico Mattia Papi and Guy Robertson, with assistance from Giovanni Rendina.

A Mahler & LeWitt Studios commission for the facade of Casa Menotti in collaboration with Fondazione Monini, supported by The Goldstone Family Foundation. Curated by Federico Mattia Papi and Guy Robertson, with assistance from Giovanni Rendina. 

Sandy Smith’s installation for the facade of Casa Menotti was conceived an ode to human strength and persistence in response to the unpredictability and temporality of nature. In the artist’s words: 

“The texts in my work often deal with temporal situations, especially in terms of interpersonal relations, which are deeply related to the human tragedy of the recent earthquakes. AS YOU WERE, AS YOU ARE, AS YOU GO, the short text which is written out in repeated loops across my installation, can be read as the combining of both a nostalgic and forward-looking response to history; the desires and constructs of our culture exist in a bubble of human-time, which has only a fleeting existence in relation to planetary or tectonic plate-time.” 

The manner of presenting these texts — as steel trellises projecting form the facade — gave a sense of architecture as protection, or as a shield. At the same time the trellises were suggestive of architecture in the process of construction and thereby the potential of destruction. 

The project was conceived as an accompaniment to the Musica da Casa Menotti program, which includes 25 free concerts with young talented musicians from Italy and abroad. 

We are extremely grateful to The Goldstone Family Foundation, without whose support this installation would not have been possible. We would also like to thanks Mazzocchi Srl (mazzocchinet.com) for their support and expertise in the fabrication of the work.

Sandy Smith (b.1983, Dunbar, Scotland) graduated from The Glasgow School of Art in 2005. He works in sculpture and installation. In 2010 he moved to New York City where he is now based. He received a Master of Fine Art at Columbia University in 2012, and was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship for his studies into perpetual growth. Describing his practice he has said: “The data array is the motif of our age. Our generation’s technological advances have stemmed from two connected ambitions: to invent & deploy tools to generate ever more data from the world, and to organise and extrapolate value (meaning) from this data. My practice is focused on rendering physical the interface points between this speculative abstracted data and ourselves. My recent work has concentrated on the sensuality and psychedelic qualities of the data array: its ecstatic feeling of possibility, contrasted with its harder demands upon our participation and/or submission. I am currently working with repetitive texts, hand-cut anti- echoic tiling, cast concrete and machine-cut wire meshes.” Smith has exhibited widely in the US and Europe, with solo exhibitions at Malraux’s Place (US), Space In Between (UK), Young World (US), Infernoesque (GR), and SWG3 (SC). He was artist in resident at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios, Spoleto, in 2016. He is represented by Space In Between, London.