A sense of post-human hauntedness pervades the sculptures, installations, videos, and occasional paintings of Michael E. Smith. The artist typically uses in his work the kinds of objects one might find in a refuse dump or, at best, at a second-hand store; these are artefacts that bear on their surfaces evidence of having been used, worn out and ultimately broken by human hands. The very fact of their being discarded imbues them with a mordant pathos, revealing them as unloved, impotent, and consigned to a material purgatory in which they refuse to degrade or disappear. Elsewhere, actual dead animals (or parts of them) enter into Smith’s sculptural vocabulary, as if to underscore the deathly quality of the manmade objects with which they are combined.
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