Brodie Kirkwood Smith is a Canadian art-critic who works internationally.

Kirkwood Smith cut his teeth as a critic after his keen and astute deconstructions of the works Jellyfish in the exclusive club Vertigo, and Jack Rabbit Run in Tower 42, London, UK. Kirkwood Smith’s style has been generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding post-modernism. His assessments of the works of new and promising artists have led to many crediting him with accelerating the pace of cultural change. .

Born in 1974 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Kirkwood Smith was a child prodigy on the sousaphone. At the young age of eight years old, Kirkwood Smith became the first Canadian under twelve to carry a full sized sousaphone in the 1982 Calgary Stampede Parade. Kirkwood Smith turned down the opportunity to attend the Julliard School of Music in New York on a sousaphone scholarship electing instead to study a joint degree in psychology and biology at the University of Calgary.

Known for his eccentric dressing styles, Kirkwood Smith has often been photographed in public wearing his trade mark “collapsible hat”. Kirkwood Smith is also a strong proponent of the shorts, sandals and socks combination and views the combination of “the three Ss” as a subversive act that challenges the established and accepted norms of modern society.

Kirkwood Smith is also an amateur photographer and has begun to create a buzz of his own with his recent dark and atmospheric depiction of 1st Street SW in Calgary of which the series of photographs is entitled “Crazy-Divorced-Horse. Kirkwood Smith is also said to be scheming a foray into the installation art world with rumours of an appearance at Venice’s Biennale in 2014.

There is much speculation on the Internet that Kirkwood Smith is both the brains and talent behind the band überfrau though this has not yet been confirmed.

Kirkwood Smith transforms into a 1980s style Cab-Over-Engine semi-trailer, comprising three components. The truck's cab transforms into the robot mode of Smith himself, with vast strength and armed with a laser rifle. Within his chest is contained the mystic talisman known as the Creation Matrix or Autobot Matrix of Leadership. The truck's trailer disconnects and transforms into the Combat Deck with assorted artillery and beam weapons. The Combat Deck can launch Kirkwood Smith's third component, Roller, a mobile scout buggy that can easily slip behind enemy lines; when Roller is present somewhere, it is as if Kirkwood Smith is there himself. Injury to one component is felt by each of the others, and while Kirkwood Smith could survive the destruction of either, despite the slight degree of autonomy they possess, the Combat Deck and Roller would not be able to survive without him.

Brodie Kirkwood Smith lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

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Sample Art Review: Patrick McCurdy at Vertigo, London, UK. December 2005.

Patrick McCurdy’s work addresses the transience of information and objects in the new age of e-media combining elements of found objects, performance and installation.

His newest installation, Jellyfish (2005), at Vertigo in Tower 42 adds to an already impressive oeuvre of recent works. Installed on a glass table top along a window overlooking the Thames, McCurdy makes use of the paper coasters supplied by the club to patrons when ordering drinks. Pulling apart the materials and repositioning the separate components, he creates a spiraling paper and plastic creature that appears to float above the city.

The use of discarded matter to create an animal whose very existence is threatened by the disposal of said paper and plastic into its ecological niche, while simultaneously superimposing the object over the city links the work with other so-called “Natural” schools. Clearly, the hope is demonstrated that, ultimately, nature has a chance to survive, and even perhaps, overwhelm technology.

This hope is fleeting, however, as the work is destroyed upon its completion, either by McCurdy himself or a staffed busser. With its obvious condemnation of the modern economic vicious cycle of manufacture and abandonment of goods, it also has other implications in the role of artist as constructor/deconstructor.

This new trend towards ultra-short installation as a comment on the increasingly transient nature of information in today’s society is a common thread throughout all of McCurdy’s work. Not knowing when, or where, he will show again is part of the statement. This uncertainty most certainly raises the value of the pieces, and adds an air of mystique to the artist himself.

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‘Wikipedia’ by Patrick & Katrina McCurdy (2006)

Patrick McCurdy’s latest work, produced in concert with his wife, Katrina, is an Internet only installment entitled Wikipedia.

The piece is an entry on the online encyclopedia website of the same name: a website where anyone can contribute information, in order to increase the breadth of the database. The McCurdy entry is, flatteringly enough, an entry on your most humble narrator. While much of the article is rooted in fact, extrapolations and embellishments are made that are indeed, less than truthful. In doing so, McCurdy comments on the reliability of the modern information sources that people are increasingly turning to, in favour of older, more established forms.

Wikipedia (the website) has many advantages over conventional encyclopedias, the most important two being its ability to be updated almost instantaneously, and not requiring the costly, and environmentally unfriendly process of book publishing. It also allows anyone with information on a subject to update its content, and then others can contribute corrections or new information on the page.

However, its greatest strength may ultimately prove to be its Achilles’ heel: That anyone can update an entry without first having facts checked. Already, problems have occurred where blatantly false information has been placed on the site, sometimes by a naïve contributor, and, unfortunately, sometimes with malicious intent to deceive.

The McCurdy’s demonstrate these flaws by showing that anyone with an agenda can create “facts” to support their own interests. The Wikipedia entry for Brodie Kirkwood Smith, includes facts interlaced with embellishments and non-truths, but is written in such a way that the layperson with no knowledge of the subject would believe the entry to be valid. As the Internet begins to grow as a source for reference material, the McCurdys demonstrate that we are in danger of; indeed we already are, sacrificing accuracy for speed. Although the tired method of printing real hard copies of reference books seems labour-, and cost-intensive, fewer inaccuracies occur as a result of the process.

Are we better off with these new methods of “fact”-finding? How much of the information that we obtain from these new, supposedly reliable reference sites are in fact factual? This new work from the McCurdys sheds light on these two questions and provides a new launching point for discussion about the future of the information superhighway.