Melancholy Objects - Lenard Smith

It’s no mistake that Lenard Smith’s new book borrows its title from Susan Sontag’s 1977 essay of the same name. Melancholy Objects – the Los Angeles-based artist’s first publication for Perimeter Editions – grounds the photographic endeavour in the surreal, the introspective, and the referential. Working in the tradition of the ragpicker, Smith sifts through personal and found objects to create formal compositions that gently intersect sculpture with the still life, broaching new purposes and hierarchies, and pulsing with a sense of humour, play, and solemnity.