Bobbi Sue Smith is an artist who works in photography, acrylic, and mixed media. She has studied fine arts, fashion design, and interior design. Smith investigates the importance of peripheral persons, spaces, and commodities by exposing them against an omnipresent corporate backdrop. Her photos are characterized by the exploration of our relationship to everyday objects and environments amid a bourgeois atmosphere in which the viewer is encouraged to self-identify. By pursuing new methods to interpret and document her neighbourhood of East Vancouver, common themes emerge in her street photography related to the ideas of indifference, estrangement from conventionality, and the ever-shifting margins between private and public space.
Her works are often about contact with the urban landscape, the human need to express within that setting, and other elemental living requirements. By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the common consciousness of middle-class materialistic values, her works reference postcolonial theory as well as the postmodern as a form of questioning the logic of the current establishment.
Smith has recently curated Shrink, A Show of Pocket-Sized Art, Make Studio, Nanaimo, and The Uncommon Show, Artist Resource Centre, Vancouver, and exhibited at IDS West, in Vancouver. She currently lives and works in East Vancouver.