Lozenge–Variant 1 will be on display in the intimate Gerald and Inez Grant Parker Community Gallery, allowing visitors to focus on this singular artwork without their attention being drawn by any adjacent works. The gradually alternating colors will produce a meditative and deliberate experience in the darkened gallery, with seating available for visitors to take their time in the space.

American artist Phillip K. Smith III (b. Calif., 1972) uses light as a medium to create optically shifting sculptures and site-specific installations. His minimal but imposing interventions into vast outdoor landscapes and more discretely scaled sculptures are nuanced perceptual encounters in response to the unique conditions of site and context. Expansive and living, Smith’s boundary dissolving sculptures use mirrors and LED technology to alter the interplay of light, color, and surface in an expanded field, proposing shifts in experiential pace to modify the viewer's physical encounter. Trained as an artist and an architect at Rhode Island School of Design, Smith incorporates the site-specificity of architecture, with its reliance on scale, and its capacity to physically impact the human interaction it supports, to create immersive viewing experiences.

The Lightworks originated when Smith created Aperture during his artist residency in 2010 at the Palm Springs Art Museum. Organized around nine pure geometric forms across a 24' long x 7' high x 2' deep internally lit topography of translucent white acrylic, Aperture created an all encompassing experience in shifting light, bathing viewers in color.  From this generative work, Smith developed his more intimate, compressed lit works focusing on two singular forms, the torus and the lozenge.  These core forms of the Lightworks series were selected for their lack of corners or intersections, allowing the eye to freely and fluidly move across their surface.  Additionally, the concentric reality of the Torus provided a natural focus, while the Lozenges created more linear compositions, as stretched spherical forms.

Recent projects include The Circle of Land and Sky (2017), part of the inaugural Desert X, the critically acclaimed Coachella Valley desert-wide, site-specific exhibition; Open Sky (2018), commissioned by Scandinavian fashion house COS for Italy's Salone del Mobile, Milan; Detroit Skybridge (2018), a 100-foot-long LED installation commissioned as part of Detroit's Library Street Collective city-wide revitalization effort; and Three Half Lozenges, a permanent acquisition activating the three two-story high windows on the 1920’s façade of the Newark Museum of Art in Newark, NJ. Upcoming public projects include Parallel Perpendicular, a series of five freestanding reflective and color-based volumes for the new West Hollywood Park in Los Angeles, CA (Winter, 2022), a 50’ high all white, torqued light and shadow work in North Scottsdale, AZ (Summer 2022), and Four Corners Extruded, a 42’ high reflective and light-based work for Seattle Sound Transit (Summer, 2022).

Smith has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Toledo Art Museum, Laguna Art Museum, Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, and the Palm Springs Art Museum. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Toledo Museum of Art, Palm Springs Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, and Newark Museum of Art, and has been featured in hundreds of print and online publications, including Architectural Digest, artnet, ARTnews, Forbes, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Wallpaper*, Yatzer, and Whitehot Magazine, among others.