‘Capture’ is the first comprehensive survey of Australian artist Sam Smith. It brings together four moving image projects from the past decade alongside a major new commission that explores relationships between geology, technology and environment.

Working across video installation, sculpture and performance, Smith’s practice interrogates both the apparatuses of image-making and the framework for their reception. His practice provides new understandings of montage, narrative, and the camera instrument itself, while also addressing the question of image-making conventions in an era of digital production.

‘Capture’ covers the breadth of Smith’s practice to date. It includes works which combine experimental video and documentary practices by interweaving speculative fictions with historical data, alongside works that reveal the capacity of moving images to manipulate our sense of time and space and to absorb viewers into imaginary realms. Smith’s practice also includes live performances that combine film, video and photographic material into streams of collaged audio-visual vignettes.

Representing Smith’s largest project to date, ‘Capture’ 2021 is a two-channel video that seeks to understand the politics of extraction and labour that enable video camera manufacture and the environmental impact of technological production. The work begins with the dismantling of a digital video camera and then aims to trace its mineral elements back to their possible origins. It draws conclusions that address potential complicity in ecological damage through the use of technological tools and features footage from geological sites in Australia and the United Kingdom.

—

Curator: José Da Silva

Sam Smith's new commission is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body and supported by the UNSW Mark Wainwright Analytical Centre, Solid State & Elemental Analysis Unit.

 

Banner: Sam Smith, ‘Capture’ 2021 (production still). Courtesy: the artist and 3+1 Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa