Nick Smith
Nick Smith | Tracy Emin Roman Standard | C-type diptych | 30 x 15 cm
I stand up from my chair with a monstrous effort, but I have the impression that I carry it with me and that it’s heavier, for it’s the chair of my subjectivity.’ Fernando Pessoa. 'The Book of Disquiet'.London: Penguin (2002) p13.
Smith’s work tries to tackle our understanding of specific places and how they can somehow gesture beyond themselves, and in so doing take us outside of smooth historical narrative. His images contain seeds of understanding that exist at the very threshold of thought, displaced and in a state of oscillation between life and death, memory and erasure. Using photography, video, drawing, and installation, Smith creates a dialog between viewer and image, a dialog where something interrupts
or breaks, a moment of caesura(1) that enables a new departure to occur.
(1) Usually means a pause in music for breath, here I mean a break in the homogeneity of experience.