In this well-known early tape, Jonas manipulates the grammar of the camera to create the sense of a grossly disturbed physical space. The space functions as a metaphor for the unstable identity of the costumed and masked female figure roaming the screen, negotiating the rolling barrier of the screen’s bottom edge.
Filmed entirely in Sweden, VIEWFINDER is a surreal sound-film that entangles gestures of place, belonging, and monument. Informed by archival research, oral history, and folk stories, the film focuses on Black immigrants who have recently migrated to Sweden. These performers enact dance-like choreographies in critical sites across the coastal town of Varberg, generated in response to an absence of Black life found in the municipal archives.
A re-working of Humphrey Jenning's 1943 seminal docu-drama The Silent Village wherein coal miners from the Welsh village of Cwmgiedd re-enact the Nazi invasion and annihilation of the resisting Czech villagers of Lidice. Principal focus in this re-mix is upon the way sound is used as a mode of social control.
Nauman stands with his back to the camera, repeatetedly drawing the bow across the strings of a violin tuned D, E, A, D. Perhaps more than any other exercise, this tape demonstrates the sense of anticipation built up in the viewer, as we wait for Nauman to walk, to turn around, to play music ... to do something. This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.
A silent, moving poem, this video incorporates the “voices” of a wide variety of text sources into one scrolling script. The majority of the footage was shot through the window of a neighborhood salon that was showing a demonstrational video of their eyebrow threading services. Originally conceived for an exhibition at Cleopatra’s in Brooklyn, NY, this video is meant for a window in a storefront space, ideally viewed from the street in the context of other commercial moving images.
The only time I’ve visited a communist country was when I went to Poland in 1980, not long after Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was first elected in Britain. I first visited the former East Germany in 1997, eight years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a few months after Tony Blair's ‘New Labour’ government was elected. Recalling these experiences many years later, White Hole questions our imaginings of life in other places, times and political systems, mirroring its narrative through its form. London and Warsaw, 1980. London and Leipzig, 1997. Where now?
“This work by John Smith looks down onto a busy Viennese intersection and a corner bakery. Constructed from hundreds of still images, it presents situations in a stilted motion, often with sinister undertones. Through this technique we're made aware of our intrinsic capacity for creating continuity, and fragments of narrative, from potentially (no doubt actually) unconnected events.”
--Mark Webber, London Film Festival (2003)
Filmed in the remains of Soweto's historic Sans Souci Cinema (1948-1998), YOLO is a makeshift structuralist mash-up created in collaboration with the Eat My Dust youth collective from the Kliptown district of Soweto, South Africa. Vibrating with mic checks and sine waves, resonating with an array of pre-roll sound — this is cause-and-e ffect shattered again and again, temporarily undone.
O humans, You Only Live Once!