Dave Smith | Overdrive (1995)
Acrylic on canvas and printed fabric | 24 x 72 inches
In Overdrive, Dave Smith utilizes a meticulous, multi-stage process to investigate the physical and ideological layers of the American West. This panoramic work is a diptych of two joined panels—the left being a traditional stretched canvas and the right a heavy, vintage printed fabric. Smith’s practice begins with a physical collage, an iterative assembly where he refines the spatial configuration of icons harvested from print media before translating the composition into a high-fidelity finished work. By utilizing found fabric that portrays a romanticized, mid-century version of Native Indigenous peoples and Western settlers, Smith forces a confrontation with the "manufactured history" of the frontier. The fabric acts as a soft, domestic backdrop for a series of hard-edge, aggressive graphic interventions, suggesting that our collective memory of the Great Expansion is constantly being obscured and redefined by contemporary commercial forces.
The left panel features a realistic, isolated rendering of a motorhome—a contemporary descendant of the 19th-century stagecoach—floating within a flat, mustard-yellow expanse. This vehicle represents the modern settler’s demand for comfort and accessibility; it is a mobile fortress of suburban convenience that allow one to navigate the "wild" while maintaining a tether to domestic luxury. The right panel disrupts the vintage narrative of the fabric with a rhythmic pattern of black and teal rectangular blocks, a motif that continues from Smith’s Sundowner (2000), suggesting the silhouette of a roadside sign stripped of its commercial text. Additionally, large, flat color shapes are strategically placed over the fabric, functioning as formalist redactions that pull the viewer’s eye away from the narrative and toward pure geometry. These shapes serve as a direct nod to the hard-edge abstraction of Ellsworth Kelly, neutralizing the historical imagery to highlight the artifice of the material itself.
The power of Overdrive lies in its extreme horizontal format, which mimics the cinematic experience of the American road. By bridging the gap between a literal "blank" canvas and a pre-printed historical textile, Smith highlights the mediation of the West. The motorhome navigates a void of pure color, while the historical figures on the right are slowly being "paved over" by modern shapes. It is a profound commentary on the "perfect fit" of commercial progress within the landscape, where the grandeur of history is reduced to a domestic pattern, efficiently organized for the consumption of the modern traveler who carries their suburban necessities into the desert.
Overdrive is a quintessential example of Neo-Pop Surrealism that dialogues deeply with the appropriation art of the Pictures Generation. By utilizing found, mass-produced textile, Smith follows in the footsteps of Sigmar Polke, who used printed fabrics to subvert the traditional hierarchy of painting. The juxtaposition of the isolated motorhome against a flat field invokes the legacy of Andy Warhol, treating the tool of middle-class leisure as a sterile, mass-produced icon. Furthermore, the integration of flat, hard-edge shapes provides a sophisticated dialogue with the minimalism of Ellsworth Kelly, but Smith pivots this formalist language toward a critical investigation of land use and cultural erasure. The deadpan presentation of Western motifs and the horizontal "windshield" perspective align the work with the career-long investigations of Ed Ruscha, positioning the American landscape as a contested stage where history is obscured by the graphic signs of the present.
Curatorial Recommendation: At 72 inches wide, Overdrive is a commanding, museum-scale work that provides significant architectural wall power. Its unique combination of vintage textile and traditional canvas makes it a seminal piece for collectors interested in the evolution of West Coast Pop and the material history of American design. This work is an essential acquisition for any collection focusing on the intersection of Indigenous representation, roadside Americana, and post-war abstraction.