Installation: Erik Smith, “Displacement,” Nassawadox, Virginia, 2027
Erik Smith is completing an installation, “Displacement,” in Nassawadox, Virginia, on the northwest corner of Seaside Road and Pine Tree Road, in the heart of Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The project is under development now, with an opening planned for 2027. Please check back here for updates or write to counterpath@gmail.com.
Smith’s work centers on—and emerges from—investigations of place: the unearthing of a nineteenth-century spiral staircase discovered by chance beneath the so-called death strip of the Berlin Wall; the casting of a “dead space” concealed within the walls of an exhibition pavilion in Austria; or, most recently, the drilling of core samples from the seventeenth-century foundations of a former castle turned contemporary art institution in Warsaw.
These explorations are grounded in what he describes as performing the site—actions that extract the underlying features and meanings of spaces while also pointing to what remains concealed and resists articulation. By drawing attention to the features of the built environment that exist at the margins of awareness, the aim is to question what constitutes a sense of place and the role that less visible, hidden, or subliminal aspects play in its perception.
The Nassawadox installation explores the tension between history, memory, and geographic displacement by introducing a “staged ruin” into a natural environment. The physical artwork consists of the top section of an old foundation wall, carefully excavated and transplanted from an architectural ruin on the Eastern Shore. Rather than building a new structure to look old, the piece introduces an authentic, historical structural fragment into an entirely new context, nestled among the trees of a wooded lot. By re-siting this material, the installation mimics the blueprint or floorplan outline of a home that never actually occupied this space. It creates a powerful destination that invites viewers to question the site’s local history and consider how we construct meaning around anonymous relics of the past. At the same time, the project emerges from substantive community engagement, including flyering and door-to-door outreach, exploring local archives, and meeting with local officials, historical societies, and other residents to navigate what it might mean to bring this project to such a community.
Erik Smith studied comparative literature and art in the US and Italy and lives and works in Berlin. His site-based projects and other works have been presented in various venues internationally including the University of Porto, Academy of Fine Arts, Porto (2023), Galerie Stadtpark, Krems (2021), de Appel Center for Contemporary Art, Amsterdam (2016), Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum (2012), SculptureCenter, NYC (2008). Smith is the recipient of various grants and fellowships including a Neustart Kultur grant from Stiftung Kunstfonds Berlin (2021), a project grant from Stadt findet Kunst, Berlin (2020), and was a guest of AIR – Artist in Residence Niederösterreich, Krems (2021). His work was recently featured in fort da, a California-based journal of psychoanalytical psychology (2023); Smith was awarded a catalog grant in 2023 from Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn.