ARTIST BIO
Paige Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates how bodies and places are intertwined. She works with moving-image, photography, installation, and performance to examine how external environments materially affect the body, and how our bodies, in turn, can interact with place.
She received her MFA (Studio Art) from the University of Waterloo, and her BFA (Film) and Post Baccalaureate Diploma (Contemporary Art) from Simon Fraser University. Her artistic-research has been supported by various institutions including the Social Science and Humanity Research Council of Canada and the British Columbia Art Council. Additionally, she has exhibited internationally in France, the United States, and Canada, including recently with the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) and University of Waterloo Art Gallery (UWAG). Her work can be found in the permanent collection of Video Out Distribution.
Paige has taught as a sessional lecturer with the University of Waterloo’s Fine Arts Department and as a sessional instructor assistant with the University of Toronto for video production courses. She has led workshops with organizations such as the Contemporary Art Gallery and VIVO Media Arts Centre, and worked as an art instructor for the City of Kitchener and Artshine. Additionally, Paige has worked in arts programming and development with the University of Waterloo’s Student Art Innovation Lab and SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement.
Paige lives in Waterloo, Ontario, which is situated within the Haldimand Tract, land that was granted to the Six Nations of the Grand River, and within the territory of the Attawandaron, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples. She was born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations.
Artist Statement
I am deeply invested in the interconnectedness of places and bodies, of how our various external contexts can orient or control our behaviours and opinions. My aim is to activate my viewers and inspire them to notice not just what I record, but how different power structures inform what I capture and frame.
In my early work, I took experimental approaches to examining how sexual expression and identity are categorized and created through various apparatuses of power. Specifically, how queer women’s understandings of our sexuality are intercepted by porn created for a heterosexual male audience that then informs our gestures and behaviours.
Later, I honed my practice through place-based artmaking, where explicit references and imagery from the subject environment became integral to the expression and experience of my work. Here, my creative process evolved, and I began gathering fragments connected to the chosen environments, such as print ephemera, maps, historical photography, and field recordings, and layering them into my work. This allows me to weave historical, cartographical, and personal contexts together, which in turns allows for a richer understanding of how an environment is interwoven with our bodies.
Now, I am bringing disability into frame after completing my MFA thesis exhibition ‘I Saw You in the Archive’, which revealed a history of eugenic practices taking place in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario between 1929 and 1976. This visual art exhibition focused on a history of ableism and classism, particularly the coerced sterilization of people deemed ‘feebleminded’. Since graduating in May 2025, I have expanded upon my previous research and have developed the current documentary ‘Feebleminded’. Here, I will continue to critique apparatuses of power that aim to control people’s sexuality through authentic person- and place-centric filmmaking. As a disabled artist living in Kitchener-Waterloo, it is vital to me that the voices of the people who were labeled ‘feebleminded’ reverberate outside the walls of the archive and be heard by audiences around the world.
As an artist with a language processing disorder, the intuitive language of my brain is not words, but filmmaking and visual art. I make art in an attempt to understand the interconnectedness of myself, others, and the world.
Paige Smith acknowledges and is grateful for the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund.
