ABOUT YOU LOOK LIKE THE RIGHT TYPE:
On November 23, 2008 in the Chicago downtown loop, while hurrying to catch the subway, a young woman approached me and asked for a cigarette. “I don't smoke,” I said. She snapped her fingers, and replied: "Ahhh, you look like the right type.” Suddenly and strangely inspired by the exchange, I raced home and illustrated our brief conversation and a daily artistic practice was born.
In a daily ritual since 2008, I redraw exact-dialogue fragments of overheard conversations as 7x11-inch India ink works-on-paper (combining verbatim, hand-drawn text with visual and tonal embellishment) and combine the single drawings into larger, theme-based conversations between people who have never met or exchanged words. When amassed together as modular narratives, the black and white drawings—voiced by strangers and collectively titled You Look Like The Right Type—share grayscale conversations with one another across time, place, age, and gender (the who, what, when, where, why, and how of documentary storytelling). And the audience, as interlocutor, triangulates the conversation by reading that which was once spoken and making their own non-linear, grayscale associations between text, image, and completion of what’s left unsaid.
November 2023 marked the fifteen-year anniversary of this archive, now containing over 6,000 works-on-paper; I’ve never missed a day of eavesdropping and drawing since I first began this series.
VIEW THE ONGOING SERIES OF DAILY, OVERHEARD CONVERSATION DRAWINGS:
ON INSTAGRAM @markaddisonsmith
ABOUT THE FIFTEENTH-ANNIVERSARY SOLO EXHIBITION:
YOU LOOK LIKE THE RIGHT TYPE—15 YEARS opened at McMaster Gallery within the School of Visual Art and Design at the University of South Carolina on October 26, 2023 and ran through November 30, 2023, with an artist's talk and campus visits with illustration + graduate students. On display were drawings from the past fifteen years with a special focus on works made during the pandemic lockdown, inspired by remote conversations with strangers across the globe.
ABOUT THE TENTH-ANNIVERSARY SOLO EXHIBITION:
YOU LOOK LIKE THE RIGHT TYPE—TEN YEARS OF DAILY DRAWINGS opened at The Bakery Atlanta on January 3, 2019 and ran through January 31, 2019, with an artist's talk and book-signing. The Bakery Atlanta celebrated You Look Like The Right Type’s tenth anniversary by showcasing 365 drawings from the archive of more than 6,000 works-on-paper.
INTERVIEWS ABOUT THIS WORK:
The Daily Heller, Print Magazine, July 1, 2022
Queerty, September 5, 2020
The Daily Heller, Print Magazine, May 4, 2020
Art Uncovered, January 18, 2019
On Creativity, April 6, 2012