Special Effects is an exhibition of new sculptural video installation works by artist Sam Smith and recently on show at Grant Pirrie Gallery, Sydney. In these works, completed in both Australia and New York between 2008-2009, Smith engages in a critique of cinema and an exposure of the technology behind video imagery, integrating sculptural form and digital media while humorously exploiting the methods of contemporary film making.
The environments of the material world and those of digital production often overlap in the artist’s attempts to draw power from the video data-verse (the digital realm). The difference between the singular camera eye (the lens) and the bifocal human gaze is a central theme in the show.
Smith utilises the mechanics of cinematic production and special effects technologies to form parallel universes in which the rational behaviour of matter is displaced by a realm of digital possibility. Using montage, multiple exposure and digital compositing Into The Void (2009) builds a tangent narrative. The artist searches New York for works of international Klein blue and a location that mirrors the site for Yves Klein’s Le Saut dans le Vide (The Leap into the Void, 1960). Once the IKB works are found the artist extends his arms into the pigment, delving into the blue screen void. This culminates in a time-based recreation of Kleinʼs famous jump. The artist hovers not only in space but also in time, suspended in a digital loop.
In the sculpture Control Structure (2008) the artist’s head is modeled larger than life from plywood, fiberglass and resin. A large digital video zoom lens extrudes from one eye socket, while the other eye is caved in and blackened. The back of the skull is broken open to reveal a LCD monitor looping a video where a film set becomes a doorway between two worlds. From the set emerges a single hovering lens imbued with the power of a parallel cinematic data-verse. As the artist comes into contact with the lens, his world is transformed, causing images to change orientation and play in reverse. This is emblematic of video’s ability to transport, reconfigure, and essentially render the contents of the world malleable. The video is presented as fragments of memory lingering inside the lifeless head with the scenes of the video fading between sequences of black.
The sculptural head itself can be seen as a substitute for a camera body, the brain of the video camera apparatus. The viewpoints of the eye and the lens are juxtaposed – both are receptors of light but they represent the difference between analogue and digital. The geometry of the skull is broken down into component parts that parallel the process of digital sampling where a series of discreet units are used in place of a linear whole.
