NADA Miami 2025

Central Server Works is proud to announce the gallery’s first art fair presentation, debuting at NADA Miami 2025 with Regarding Structures, a solo installation of photography by Los Angeles–based interdisciplinary artist Lenard Smith (b. 1975).

Smith, a first-generation Ghanaian-American artist and educator, has developed a practice that merges photography, sculpture, architecture, and diasporic history into formal studies that double as vessels for memory and speculative futures. In Regarding Structures, Smith turns to the archive of photographic mattes from his adolescence and early studio years—once peripheral materials used to frame and protect images—and reimagines them as speculative architectures, both physical and conceptual. The photography matte, historically tied to practices of protection and display, especially in Black domestic spaces where framed photographs quietly asserted dignity and self-representation, becomes central material in Smith’s compositions. Through careful staging, backdrops of color, and controlled lighting, the once-secondary support transforms into a subject of inquiry, carrying memory, cultural resonance, and a critique of the politics of display.

On view will be 12 medium-scale brushed aluminum framed photographs. Developed in his Los Angeles studio during Smith’s residency as Visiting Artist and Professor at the University of California, Riverside in 2024–2025, the works took shape in conversation with Long Term Engagement (2024–2025), a photographic study of the campus Fine Arts Complex—a layered brutalist structure whose presence informed Smith’s formal language. These structures echo not only architectural rhythm but also diasporic memory—stacked, fragmented, and reassembled across time and space. In January 2026, Smith will open Lenard Smith: Fortuitous Encounters, his first solo museum exhibition at the California Museum of Photography, presenting selections from two bodies of work, Fortuitous Encounters (2018–2020) and Melancholy Objects (2022). Both series titles refer to the work of critic Susan Sontag (1933–2004), whose writing on photography has been instrumental to the theorization of the medium.

Regarding Structures extends Smith’s recent explorations of form and modularity. His earlier series Last Departure (2021) used folded paper in grayscale, while Maquettes (2022) introduced painted wood in Yves Klein blue. Here, Smith moves beyond restraint into a vocabulary of color, atmosphere, and affect. The works no longer present models alone, but mise-en-scène—speculative spaces imbued with presence and memory.

Smith situates his practice within both a diasporic tradition of reuse and reframing, and a larger architectural history. His interest in modern architecture was first sparked during formative trips to Berlin, Germany between 2000 to 2003, where he photographed emerging and transitional cityscapes—railway underpasses, concrete shells, and modular constructions—that remain touchstones in his visual language. This experience anchors his attention to how built environments hold both history and futurity, resonating with the photographic precision of Thomas Demand’s paper architectures and the pedagogical experiments of Black Mountain College, where topology and geometry were deployed to rethink the relationship between form, space, and lived experience. In this lineage, Regarding Structures occupies the charged space between support and subject, surface and depth, abstraction and lived history—making visible the architectures of memory and the infrastructures of diasporic imagination.