Opening - Friday 29th May 5.30-7pm
Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition Sacrosanct
“To live means to leave traces.” - Walter Benjamin
Mickey Smith is deeply attentive to the fragility of knowledge systems, their inevitable decay and their survival. For more than two decades the American-born, Aotearoa-based artist has closely examined libraries in the US, New Zealand and the Pacific.
Now, with Sacrosanct, we see an evolution from Smith’s award-winning photographic series Volume. With this expansion on her decades-long inquiry into the physical and social significance of texts and archives, she turns her gaze to libraries cloistered in monasteries.
It is tempting to picture the artist as a young girl in 1970s Minnesota sitting among the stacks in her local library, her nose in a book. The truth is a little less tidy. Smith didn’t find herself in an academic environment until she entered university. Books, to her, were merely utilitarian. So, what drew her to a theological library in the English Midlands with 229 hand-transcribed Latin manuscripts dating back to the 12th century?
On the surface, aesthetics and materiality speak for themselves. Hereford Cathedral’s Chained Library is the largest to survive with all chains, rods and locks intact, physically restraining the valuable religious texts to this day. As if the metal hardware isn’t enough, frayed strips of cotton are knotted chastely around the manuscripts, and the fore-edges rather than the spines, face the reader (viewer).
Smith transforms her chosen documents into monumental subjects, enlarged beyond realistic proportions. Gifting them a kind of architectural authority, they are no longer manuscripts, but rather sculptural objects charged with absence and memory. They have been witnesses to the passing of time, to history itself, and they insist on being considered. Seen now, in an age of limitless digital replication and AI, the images acquire an unexpected poignancy. They remind us that access to knowledge has always been shaped by systems of control and hierarchy.
Walter Benjamin’s observation that “to live means to leave traces” has a haunting resonance here. The ancient volumes bear the accumulated marks of centuries of touch, preservation and institutional care. In Smith’s hands, they cease to function merely as repositories of sacred knowledge and instead become material records of human presence. The worn bindings, faded surfaces and chains speak not only to the protection of knowledge, but to the fragile traces left behind by generations attempting to preserve memory against time. Smith understands the library as Benjamin did history: not as something fixed or complete, but as a layered accumulation of physical and cultural residue.
After lengthy negotiations for access this past April to the 17th Century Strahov Library in the monastic church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in Prague, Smith ignored the troves of theological and philosophical books inside the two majestic Baroque halls. Instead, she was drawn to ancient, crumbling tomes of legal texts stacked in double rows and hidden from public view in a passageway.
Her quietly exacting portraits of the books, straightforward in composition, appear to continue to follow her self-imposed set of rules, only this time the rules were supplied to her by way of the contracts she had to sign with the order: Use only available natural light, only one tripod, never change position, work only with chance - don’t rearrange anything. Ironically, with rules so alike her own, Smith struggled with the task at hand. Instead of days moving in and out of the library stacks, thinking and pondering, she had to work within a tight time frame, as if the photograph and not the conceptual layer she brings was the point. A solo docent seated nearby was a constant unwelcome audience.
Wrapped and rewrapped in animal skin to bind them and then whitewashed, the subjects of her photographs are cracking and peeling. The viewer sees hints of what's inside. They are decaying, they look like they are disintegrating, slowly disappearing. Sometimes they even look like weathered bones. They demand a more careful study than her previous photographic series, with their found words and phrases, and the longer you look, the more deeply moving they become.
Smith has further blurred the line between photography, sculpture and painting by printing these works onto canvas, purposefully directing us to the fragility, intimacy and corporeality of her subjects. What ordinarily exists in the periphery of institutional spaces suddenly demands our sustained attention, reminding us how human these archival systems remain.
Smith’s work feels especially timely now. Over the past year, when she wasn’t in England or Prague, she has spent more time in Minnesota than in Tāmaki Makaurau. It becomes difficult to remain detached when chaos and suffering land on your own doorstep. After a series of deadly ICE operations made her birthplace a political flashpoint, the impact was felt beyond the news headlines with heightened tension around public safety and civil liberties – rights that should be sacrosanct.
Combined with ongoing wars, Smith describes a feeling that society is crumbling. While wondering whether she had correctly packed the grab bag under her bed, she spied a job advert on the Library and Information Association of Aotearoa New Zealand website for a curator for a private “End of the World” library at Westhaven Estate in Mangarākau.
For Smith libraries have always been living systems shaped by politics and public imagination, by time, entropy and preservation. The body of work in Sacrosanct exists then as something of an antidote to our fear and paranoia, to our shaken world order. They are a reminder that we've been through difficult times before.
- Nadine Rubin Nathan
This exhibition is part of the Auckland Festival of Photography
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