“London artist John Smith uses light-hearted humour to explore theoretical concerns - Gargantuan, for instance, is both pleasantly silly and acutely conscious of how imagery depends entirely on its framing. A voice-over intones the words ‘huge’ and ‘strapping’ as a lizard almost fills the...
From the idea that glass, even when cooled, is a liquid that changes in appearance over time, an offscreen narrator launches a recollection of the bygone days of manual glassmaking and an observation of the impact of the mass-produced glass on the changing appearance of England over time.
Home Suite, Smith’s first video work, is a close-up journey through a domestic landscape and a journey through memory, containing only three cuts over the course of its ninety-six minutes duration. Playing upon ambiguity and the unseen, the tape uses physical details of the space to trigger...
7P is constructed around the carol The Twelve Days of Christmas and incorporates similar picture and sound fragments recorded over the Christmas period 1977-8. Using the song as a determining framework, the film is edited so that picture and sound recorded on consecutive days are juxtaposed in each...
An improvisation recorded over the course of one day, starting at dawn and finishing after dusk. The film was edited in camera and shot from one camera position in the middle of one of the 112 football pitches that cover Hackney Marsh, a location chosen because of the similarities between the...
Recorded from a smartphone screen, its translation app running on the wrong settings and struggling to interpret North London street signs in French and convert them to English, Steve Hates Fish turns errors into unintentional poetry.
A larger than life tribute to Prince Philip, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, recorded in 2002 and completed on the day of his death, April 9th 2021.
Blue Bathroom is a distillation of ideas concerning the tension between representation and materiality. It begins with an apparently straightforward representational image which is gradually revealed to be an artifice, foregrounding the filmmaking process as subject matter. By superimposing and...
A personal interpretation of the poetry and letters of T S Eliot which explores the ambiguities of language and space in a scenario built around an anagram.
A disorientating experience while attempting to watch the TV news in an Irish hotel room triggers a spontaneous response to the bombing of Afghanistan.
An exploration of the ambiguities of documentary photographs which develops ideas triggered by a German pun. Worst Case Scenario starts out as a series of still photographs depicting daily life on a Viennese street corner. The film re-orders and manipulates a selection of these images, and as it...
Lost Sound documents fragments of discarded audio tape found on the streets of a small area of East London, combining the sound retrieved from each piece of tape with images of the place where it was found. The work explores the potential of chance, creating portraits of particular places by...
On the 23rd of June 2016 Britain voted to leave the European Union. Who Are We? is a re-working of material from a BBC television debate transmitted a few weeks earlier.”The most provocative of the bunch is John Smith’s Who Are We?. Leading up to the Brexit vote, BBC’s Question Time became...
John Smith’s Leading Light evolves a sense of screen depth and surface through the simple agency of light. The film is shot in a room over a period of a day and records the changes in light through the single window. The image is controlled through manipulation of aperture, of shutter release, of...
Back stroke butterfly, front crawl and bras, we are awash in an ocean of bubbles. Meanwhile Captain Ahab sets sail on his magic carpet in search of the whale. All is not well in the world but Eden is there, fresh from her garden, tuning into “The Far Away Land”. We are deep in the cloud of our...
A reworking of material from the 16mm film ‘Blue Bathroom’, a distillation of ideas concerning the tension between representation and materiality. By superimposing and alternating identical framings of two windows filmed by day and by night the film uses their positive/negative aspect to...
