Casey Jex Smith’s studio in his home in Provo.

Twenty-five years ago this week, in the first issue of 15 Bytes, Casey Jex Smith made an appearance in these pages. He was fresh out of art school and participating in his first exhibition, In and Out of Habit, a six-person collaborative show at the Salt Lake City Library’s Atrium Gallery.

The review was, shall we say, skeptical.

The paintings themselves were “striking,” the writer conceded, but the lengthy statement accompanying them prompted a broadside against art-school jargon and the impulse to explain what art was supposed to mean. Smith and his fellow artists were exploring repetition, habit and the ways past experiences shape relationships. Twenty-five years later, Smith is still interested in what remains of experience—but these days he lets memory do the editing.

For the past decade, Smith has been drawing imaginary spaces, constructed from fragments of dreams, memories and video game worlds. The drawing currently on his drafting table begins somewhere particularly familiar: the southwest corner of his Provo backyard.

Casey Jex Smith’s work in progress.

“I don’t take any photos or draw from life, but from memory,” he says. “Whatever my brain can remember is important and any detail left out is not.”

On top of that remembered backyard, Smith is drawing something that isn’t there—at least not yet. It is something he would like to build, “a place for the body that moves beyond a hot tub.” The drawing is the second in what he anticipates will become a series of eight to ten works for an exhibition in New York next fall.

The first, “Swing Set,” began in the southeast corner of the same backyard. After taking mushrooms, Smith was watching a storm roll up against the mountains when he hallucinated faces peeking from a dark area in the foliage. That experience found its way into the colored-pencil drawing.

In both works, the backyard provides a kind of scaffolding rather than a subject to be faithfully recorded. Smith starts with a real place, removes the reference material and allows memory, imagination and altered perception to determine what remains—and what gets built there next.

Casey Jex Smith, “Swing Set”

Smith lives in Provo with his partner, artist Amanda Smith, and their two children. His work has been exhibited at The Drawing Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. He is represented by Stellarhighway Gallery in Brooklyn and curates The Drawing Stall on Instagram. When he isn’t drawing, he works as a product design manager for an education technology company and plays fantasy kingdom simulators on his Steam Deck.

15 Bytes

UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.