Utilizing an intricate layering of live performance and recorded playback, Casey Smallwood’s work addresses the subconscious ferment brewing just underneath the surface of quotidian reality. To mine this psychically charged material, Smallwood constructs role-playing exercises that result in performances in which the behavior of her subjects becomes screened through fictionalized scenarios. For Smallwood, such screening functions through the idiom of mathematical addition; when an actor adds a character on top of his or her own persona, a previously unknown term is born results on the other side of the equation.

In earlier works like Making Pretend (2008) and Endearment Exercise (2008), Smallwood utilizes the consumption of Hollywood films to examine the structure of mother/daughter relationships. In Making Pretend, Smallwood’s mother Susie Smallwood, a frequent subject in Smallwood's videos, reenacts scenes from Alice in Wonderland utilizing props found in her father's family den. While the homemade quality of the reenactment lends the film the poignant sweetness of an intimate family moment, Smallwood’s works quickly develop a darker and more ambivalent tone. In Endearment Exercise, Susie takes on the role of Emma Horton from the 1983 film Terms of Endearment. She recounts Emma’s emotionally arduous struggles with her mother in a matter of fact way seems to straddle a line between first-person plot summary and confessional talk therapy.

In a pair of works from 2011, Smallwood’s investigation of parental dynamics and media consumption turns to the discomfiting territory of parental sexuality. In Penthouse 7, Smallwood mounted the re-photographed pages of her father’s collection of Penthouse magazines. While the earlier work demonstrated the way in which the viewing of Hollywood cinema is predicated upon identification with characters, Penthouse 7 explores the psychic distancing necessary for the consumption of pornography. As Susie's reenactments replicate the process of character-identification, the father’s disembodied gaze is redoubled by its presentation through the objects of its lust. In Four Scenes for Mother, Susie's narrates sex scenes from four popular films from the 1990s--Ghost, Pretty Woman, Basic Instinct and Sliver. This narration is presented in split screen with the reenactment of these scenes based upon Susie's descriptions. By insisting on the female perspective detailed by a female narrator, Smallwood challenges the notion of a structurally male cinematic gaze posited by Laura Mulvey in her landmark essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.

As a whole, Smallwood's work resonates with a number of feminist artists working in the 1980s. Artists like Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine all sought to explore the way in which popular culture—from advertising images to filmic characters—frame the condition of feminine subjectivity. But Smallwood's work also has an important touchstone in the contemporaneous work of Eric Fischl, who sought to re-situate the Freudian narratives of psychosexual maturation within the confines of the late-twentieth century suburban home. Freud was however notoriously mute of the development of the feminine psyche, and Smallwood therefore works in territory that the Freudian Fischl could never really touch.

For They're Better Out Here, Aren't They?, her latest work that will be completed during her residency at High Concept Laboratories, Smallwood will build on prior performance works such as The Host and the Guru (2011) that utilized ensemble casts. But while such works were not filmed, Smallwood will record the improvised actions of a host of actors, who will remain in character for the duration of the shoot—up to eight hours. Such a marathon filming session will push the tension between the character personae that the actors will assume (including roles such as the Screenwriter and the Medicine Man) and their own projections of self. Much like Warhol in his famed Screen Tests, Smallwood will work to foster a deeper understanding of self in her actors and her audience through the untiring eye of the camera.

Embracing mass culture and challenging theoretical constructs, Smallwood's videos are produced with a signature blend of charged content and deadpan delivery. It is through this mixture of the popular and the erudite, the scandalous and the straightforward, Smallwood probes beneath the surface of identity formation. Smallwood's works consistently emphasize the multivalent nature of role-playing—suggesting that the notion of performance structures not only the craft of the actor but also the experience of daily life.