Kaitlyn Jo Smith

Kaitlyn Jo Smith is an interdisciplinary artist focused on the present and future trajectories of America’s working class. Raised by skilled laborers in rural Ohio, Smith was thirteen when the housing market crashed and nearly every adult she knew was suddenly out of work. Her artworks render visible the intangible realities of unemployment by utilizing automation, machine learning and 3D scanning and printing. These technologies are directly linked to the loss of over 4 million US manufacturing jobs since 2000. Her work has shown nationally and internationally at the Tucson Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, Arizona, CO-OPt Gallery in Lubbock, Texas, ROY G BIV Gallery in Columbus, Ohio and Split Videoart Festival in Split, Croatia. Smith has also been featured in PDNedu and Don’t Smile Magazine.

American Standard

American Standard, comprised of the works Fixtures, Lights Out and Restitutions, addresses issues surrounding automation by utilizing processes that have rendered the shift-worker nearly obsolete. In American Standard, Kaitlyn Jo Smith has replaced workers with 3D scanning, 3D printing (Fixtures), machine learning (Lights Out) and augmented reality (Restitutions) to question the ethics surrounding the current state of labor practices in the United States, while drawing attention to the individuals that these processes replace. Through this project, the author becomes the archeologist of her own family’s recent past to show that automated America is not some dystopian fantasy, but rather a contemporary reality with implications for the psyche of an entire societal class.