Embedded Files
Blind Spot by Kaitlyn Jo Smith, recipient of the 2023-24 Alice C. Cole ’42 Fellowship from the Wellesley College Art Department, has staked its claim in Jewett Gallery. A one-to-one fabric replica of a semi-truck trailer dominates the space, inhaling and exhaling in slow, massive breaths. Google Maps images are projected across the white fabric surface; Smith erased semi-trucks from the images and used AI to fill the blank spaces with roadside infrastructure. The support provided by the Alice C. Cole ’42 Fellowship has allowed Smith to increase the scale of her work while she deepens her investigation into career-spanning concepts of automation, repetition, and religion.
Much of Smith’s work explores the way that repetition can induce a trance-like state and how this state is used in religious and industrial contexts. In American Standard, 2021, Smith 3D-printed dozens of a single fragment of pottery scavenged from the factory where her father worked. In Consumption, 2023, the artist melded hundreds of plastic communion wafers together to form an assembly-line pattern that dizzies the eyes. In Blind Spot, the truck’s constant breathing combines with countless images and a pulsing soundscape to create an endless repetitive experience. Smith compares this immersive sensation to “driving to work, arriving, and not remembering how you got there.” By inducing this trance-state among visitors, Smith inducts them into the collective experience that she predicts will be lost to the onslaught of Autonomous Trucking.
Smith plays with expectations of how visitors should move throughout a gallery: stand a few feet apart from the art, speak in low tones, and other such orderly modes of behavior. The size of Blind Spot interrupts this usual pattern, “takes over the space, and makes people look,” a concept for which Smith cites artist Jenny Holzer. The industrial scale of the trailer contrasts with its billowing white fabric to create an object that is “both startling and inviting." The “push and pull” between ominous and comforting further heightens the liminal trance-state created by this work.
As an interdisciplinary artist, Smith combines her artistic training in photography with craft techniques she learned at home. For future explorations, she plans to more deeply consider the juxtaposition already present in her work between historically male dominated industries and sewing, “a traditionally domestic, homemaker activity.” Isabella King explored a similar contrast in Take Caution, 2024, through soft quilted sculptures of caution tape and parking cones. Additionally, Smith is looking to push the boundaries of scale even further. She aims to “grow beyond the four walls of the gallery space,” recognizing Rachel Whiteread’s work with negative space and architecture as inspiration.
The effects of Autonomous Trucking will ripple far beyond the occupation itself, Smith argues, as the trucking industry is an unacknowledged “backbone” of American culture. Blind Spot makes the invisible visible; Smith aims to “confront [the non-working class] with something they usually don’t have to think about,” in order to “open doors to conversations between different socioeconomic stations.” Blind Spot doesn’t offer a value judgment on the rise of Autonomous Trucking; instead, it creates a shared sensorial experience that invites visitors to formulate their own opinion on the trucking industry and its potential future trajectory.
All quotes are from conversation with Kaitlyn Jo Smith, 11/8/2024.
Essay by Beatrice Geissinger Cutchins '27.
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