ELEMENTS: Sam Smith
4th December – 23rd January, 2022
OPENING 5.30PM SATURDAY 4 DECEMBER 2021
Australian UK based artist Sam Smith’s hypnotic installations in his solo exhibition ELEMENTS, interweave the complex relationships between nature, the built environment and its connection to human existence through a collection of moving images, sculptural forms and sound.
The exhibition’s central work NOTES is an installed manifestation of an ongoing archive of audio-visual material used in the artist’s live performances since 2013. Projected across a multi-levelled structure, satellite imagery, computer animation, film and video sources, photography and text are sequenced into constellations where relationships form across time.
Smith’s practice overlaps cinematic, geological and architectural histories, while applying thoughts and ideas within an ontological framework. Embedded within the colonial architecture of The Lock-Up’s spaces, ELEMENTS contemplates the analytical and poetic binaries of these objects and their interconnected histories.
Curated by Courtney Novak and Holly Farrell.
ABOUT SAM SMITH
Sam Smith is an artist and filmmaker, and the Co-Director of Obsidian Coast with Nella Aarne – a space for exhibitions, residencies and events in Bradford on Avon, UK – where he lives and works. Querying the manipulations inherent in moving image capture and production, his work brings documentary and archival content in contact with speculative narratives to render visible the connective charges between geological formations, architectural apertures, (cinematic) histories, paranormal entities and unimagined futures.
Smith’s films, video installations and live desktop performances have has been presented at numerous international art institutions and film festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, UNSW Galleries (Sydney), Kai Art Center (Tallinn), Gotland Konstmuseet and Sörmlands Museum (Sweden), Whitechapel Gallery and Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, Les Rencontres Internationales (Paris and Berlin), Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts (Hong Kong) De Appel Arts Centre (Amsterdam) E-WERK (Freiburg), Riga International Short Film Festival 2ANNAS, Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), The Telfer Gallery for Glasgow International 2016, Centro de Artes Visuais (Portugal), Australian Centre for Moving Image (Melbourne), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin) and the Art Gallery of NSW (Sydney).
