Sam Smith

Sam Smith

Birth : , Sydney, Australia

History

Sam Smith (b. Sydney, Australia) 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, 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).

Profile

Sam Smith

Movies

Lithic Coda
Editor
Filmed on the volcanic island of Gotland, Sweden, the work unites myth, body and landscape when a raincoated dancer is stunned by an encounter with a floating, living, rotating rock.
Lithic Coda
Cinematography
Filmed on the volcanic island of Gotland, Sweden, the work unites myth, body and landscape when a raincoated dancer is stunned by an encounter with a floating, living, rotating rock.
Lithic Coda
Director
Filmed on the volcanic island of Gotland, Sweden, the work unites myth, body and landscape when a raincoated dancer is stunned by an encounter with a floating, living, rotating rock.
Lithic Choreographies
Editor
An experimental documentary shot on the Swedish island of Gotland. It mines historical data, mingling it with speculative fictions, to chronicle different chapters embedded to the island's geological strata. Working with locals to ground the film's investigations within the myriad communities of Gotland, Smith seeks to re-imagine our modes of engagement with and contributions to ecological assemblages. Scanning the landscape characterised by palaeo-sea-stacks, fossil coastlines, concrete production plants and limestone quarries, the film focuses a lens on minerals circulated in economic, cultural and agricultural contexts.
Lithic Choreographies
Cinematography
An experimental documentary shot on the Swedish island of Gotland. It mines historical data, mingling it with speculative fictions, to chronicle different chapters embedded to the island's geological strata. Working with locals to ground the film's investigations within the myriad communities of Gotland, Smith seeks to re-imagine our modes of engagement with and contributions to ecological assemblages. Scanning the landscape characterised by palaeo-sea-stacks, fossil coastlines, concrete production plants and limestone quarries, the film focuses a lens on minerals circulated in economic, cultural and agricultural contexts.
Lithic Choreographies
Director
An experimental documentary shot on the Swedish island of Gotland. It mines historical data, mingling it with speculative fictions, to chronicle different chapters embedded to the island's geological strata. Working with locals to ground the film's investigations within the myriad communities of Gotland, Smith seeks to re-imagine our modes of engagement with and contributions to ecological assemblages. Scanning the landscape characterised by palaeo-sea-stacks, fossil coastlines, concrete production plants and limestone quarries, the film focuses a lens on minerals circulated in economic, cultural and agricultural contexts.
Terror Nullius
Color Grading
Hitch a ride into the dark heart of Australia with Soda_Jerk's TERROR NULLIUS, a blistering, badly behaved sample-based film that confronts the horror of our contemporary moment. Equal parts political satire, eco-horror and road movie, TERROR NULLIUS is a rogue remapping of national mythology, where a misogynistic remark is met with the sharp beak of a bird, feminist bike gangs rampage and bicentenary celebrations are ravaged by flesh-eating sheep. By intricately remixing fragments of Australia's pop culture and film legacy, TERROR NULLIUS interrogates the unstable entanglement of fiction that underpins this country's vexed sense of self.
Terror Nullius
Sound Designer
Hitch a ride into the dark heart of Australia with Soda_Jerk's TERROR NULLIUS, a blistering, badly behaved sample-based film that confronts the horror of our contemporary moment. Equal parts political satire, eco-horror and road movie, TERROR NULLIUS is a rogue remapping of national mythology, where a misogynistic remark is met with the sharp beak of a bird, feminist bike gangs rampage and bicentenary celebrations are ravaged by flesh-eating sheep. By intricately remixing fragments of Australia's pop culture and film legacy, TERROR NULLIUS interrogates the unstable entanglement of fiction that underpins this country's vexed sense of self.
Terror Nullius
Visual Effects Compositor
Hitch a ride into the dark heart of Australia with Soda_Jerk's TERROR NULLIUS, a blistering, badly behaved sample-based film that confronts the horror of our contemporary moment. Equal parts political satire, eco-horror and road movie, TERROR NULLIUS is a rogue remapping of national mythology, where a misogynistic remark is met with the sharp beak of a bird, feminist bike gangs rampage and bicentenary celebrations are ravaged by flesh-eating sheep. By intricately remixing fragments of Australia's pop culture and film legacy, TERROR NULLIUS interrogates the unstable entanglement of fiction that underpins this country's vexed sense of self.
E.1027
Director
E.1027 is a performance based on the complex history and imagined future of Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray’s eponymous villa. A history of conflict, etched within the building’s material structure, plays out in episodes of companionship, obsession, murder and destruction. The work actively seeks to diminish the importance of Le Corbusier within this narrative, whose obsessive relationship with Gray’s villa is encaptured in his vandalistic murals that were painted directly onto the walls of the house.
The Horizontal Window
Editor
Glass occupies a position between fluidity and stasis – an amorphous element, integral in the production of moving images and architectural vistas, that actively distorts and transforms light. Filmed in a glass blowing factory, the interiors of Le Corbusier’s 1923 Villa Le Lac, and the surrounds of southwest Switzerland, The Horizontal Window intercuts two contrasting aspect ratios that parallel the primary apertures of Villa Le Lac: an 11-meter ribbon window facing Lake Geneva and a smaller, squarer unglazed frame cut into the exterior garden wall.
The Horizontal Window
Director
Glass occupies a position between fluidity and stasis – an amorphous element, integral in the production of moving images and architectural vistas, that actively distorts and transforms light. Filmed in a glass blowing factory, the interiors of Le Corbusier’s 1923 Villa Le Lac, and the surrounds of southwest Switzerland, The Horizontal Window intercuts two contrasting aspect ratios that parallel the primary apertures of Villa Le Lac: an 11-meter ribbon window facing Lake Geneva and a smaller, squarer unglazed frame cut into the exterior garden wall.
Hollywood Burn
Director
Mimicking the hyperbolic rhetoric of today’s copyright cops, Hollywood Burn pits a righteous league of video pirates against the evil tyrant Moses and his Copyright Commandments. Determined to alter the present by changing the past, the pirates travel back to 1955 to construct the ultimate weapon: an Elvis Presley video-clone. Part sci-fi + rom com + biblical epic + action movie, this free-culture manifesto adopts the tactical responses of the parasite, feeding off the body of Hollywood and inhabiting its cinematic structures and codes. The unwitting all-star cast includes Elvis Presley, Charlton Heston, Monkey, Batman, Bette Davis, Jaws, Jesus, The Hulk, The Hoff and the Ghostbusters.