American artist Phillip K. Smith III (b. Calif., 1972) uses light as a medium to create optically shifting sculptures and site-specific installations. His minimal but imposing interventions into vast outdoor landscapes and more discreetly scaled sculptures are nuanced perceptual encounters in response to the unique conditions of site and context. Expansile and living, Smith's boundary-dissolving sculptures alter the interplay of light, color, and surface in an expanded field, proposing shifts in experiential pace to modify the viewer's physical encounter. Trained as an artist and an architect at Rhode Island School of Design, Smith incorporates the site- specificity of architecture, with its reliance on scale and its capacity to physically impact the human interaction it supports to create immersive viewing experiences.
Recent projects include The Cube (2024), an 18' high reflective toroid cube sited as the new icon of a Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed project in La Jolla, CA; TRI-HEX-CIRC (2024), a 50' high all-white, torqued light and shadow work in North Scottsdale, AZ, and Four Corners Extruded (2024), a 42' high reflective and light-based work for Seattle Sound Transit Parallel Perpendicular (2021), a series of 5 freestanding reflective and color-based volumes for West Hollywood Park in Los Angeles, CA; Three Half Lozenges (2021), a permanent acquisition activating the three two-story high windows on the 1920s façade of the Newark Museum of Art in Newark, NJ; Open Sky (2018), commissioned by Scandinavian fashion house COS for Italy's Salone del Mobile, Milan; Detroit Skybridge (2018), a 100-foot-long LED installation commissioned as part of Detroit's Library Street Collective’s city-wide revitalization effort, and The Circle of Land and Sky (2017), part of the inaugural Desert X, the critically acclaimed Coachella Valley desert-wide, site-specific exhibition. Smith’s Joshua Tree, CA project, Lucid Stead (2013), continues to be celebrated as a significant example of light-based site-specific works.
In 2022-2023, Smith had two concurrently running solo museum exhibitions: Three Parallels at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and Light + Change at Palm Springs Art Museum. He has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Toledo Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, and Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Toledo Museum of Art, Palm Springs Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, and Newark Museum of Art, and has been featured in hundreds of print and online publications, including Architectural Digest, artnet, ARTnews, Forbes, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Wallpaper*, Yatzer, and Whitehot Magazine, among others.