How Kambel Smith’s Sculptures Of Philly Landmarks Radiate “Us”

BY JOEY SWEENEY | The city itself, as ever, is up for debate and it’s economical and generational and always always always hotly contested. For a moment, let us accept that, and recall instead one of the things we all ever liked about Philadelphia in the first place: The buildings! Philadelphia is full of stately structures that convey both the dignities and indignities of the past, and that we are in dialogue with all of this every time we walk down the street.

That dialogue is beautiful and strange and there has always been a slowly churning body of art work about the city that does the difficult job of articulating and celebrating it. Kambel Smith’s sculptures are now a part of that, and I can’t stop looking at them.

Smith is a Philly-based artist who identifies as an Autisarian —  “a person born with super-human abilities due to the condition called autism” — and has a show of work currently up at Fleisher/Ollman that closes on May 26. The work in this show, and the form he’s been working in for a little while, are brain-ticklingly accurate recreations of iconic buildings, made to scale with any number of materials, from cardboard to gold leaf.

The visual accuracy (or maybe just the way the sculptures have an acute-ness or intentional, loving severity?) of them is absolutely striking. But there’s an emotion that comes across in them that is every bit as powerful. Smith’s Ben Franklin Bridge or PMA, for instance, show their seams in a way that feels true, and is an analog to what it feels like to experience them in real life. They’re generous in the way that these very structures are generous, the way they’ve been in conversation with us our whole lives. Giants walk among both versions of them, and Smith has the grace to make that plain for all of us.