ARTIST BIO
Paige Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates how bodies and places are intertwined. She works with moving-image, installation, performance, and print materials 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
My practice examines how bodies and places shape one another: how history travels through us, how a site settles in our body, and how our bodies, in turn, can change a place. Working across moving image, installation, performance, and print, my aim is to create work that sparks new perspectives in my viewers while encouraging them to ground themselves biologically and geographically.
I believe that all mental phenomena are intrinsically tied to our bodies and environments, and my work aims to reconnect my viewers to their mind-bodies. To make art that audiences understand not only through cognition, but also their felt experiences, I make art with my whole body. I attune myself to the environment that I’m working within, allowing sensitivity and curiosity to guide my conscious practice of noticing. I observe what affects I feel, noting especially when certain environmental stimuli evoke strong reactions in myself.
As an artist with the learning disorder dyslexia, which is a neurodevelopment processing issue that affects my word recognition, decoding, and spelling abilities, I am driven to visual communication. Filmmaking and visual art are the intuitive languages of my brain.
My process also involves gathering fragments connected to the environments I’m examining—such as print ephemera, maps, historical photography, 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.
My aim is to evoke new and positive perspectives in my audience while representing a resonate, poetic truth. A truth that cannot be pinned down, cannot be accurately translated into words or numbers, but is deeply felt inside the body. Art that is experienced through the whole body has the power to inspire major new perspectives.
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.
