Dad’s Stick features three well-used objects that were shown to the artist by his father before he died. Two of these were so steeped in history that their original forms and functions were obscured. The third seemed to be instantly recognizable, but turned out to be something else entirely.

As the rings of a tree mark the layers of time, John Smith’s moving five-minute wonder remembers his father through a series of objects that unearth surprising revelations. Painterly abstraction gives way to something else entirely and like all Smith’s work, it’s clever, economical, and unexpected.