London-based filmmaker John Smith screens Lost Sound at the Front Room today thru December 5, 2010.  From his compendium of over 40 videos, films and installations, which he presents across a variety of platforms including movie theatres, exhibition spaces and televisions, Lost Sound is specific case of film that obscures the roles of representation and abstraction, documentary and fiction.

Developing this specific kind of cinematic language, Lost Sound composes footage taken on the streets of East London: the subjects are pieces of discarded audio tape inhabiting barb wire fences, tree branches, and other miscellaneous locations within the city’s sidelines.  In collaboration with sound artist Graeme Mille, the ambient sound is skillfully mixed with audio data from the remnant music tapes found on-site, which was re-recorded and inserted back into the film’s sound design. Smith and Mille layer image and sound into an elaborate experience for the viewer to de-code, addressing traditional roles of environment and viewer, perception and narrative.

Image Credit:

John Smith, Flag Mountain (Southern Nicosia, looking towards the border with the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus), 2010. HD video, color, sound, seamless loop (8 minutes cycle). Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton Gallery.

The current exhibition at the Front Room announces itself as a domestic space inside the Museum Walls.  The three artists – Zipora Fried, Margarete Jakschik and Sam Windett – contribute individual works that come to collectively resonate impressions of intimacy and domesticity.  Upon entering the Front Room, Fried’s black knit dining room table fills the space with sensations of dinner-table etiquette while its wool covering mystifies the art-object’s connotations.  Margarete Jakschik presents a collection of photographs that evoke the unceremonious but majestic sensibilities of American iconography.  The paintings of Sam Windett display his deep appreciation for the still-life tradition, recalling tropes of Modernism in their small but intense forms.

The exhibition closes October 31, 2010.  Visit www.camstl.org for more information.

Re: Between Beach Ball and Rubber Raft
March 26 at 5:53pm

Hi Marie,

How’s Vienna? You have no idea how much I miss it! Thanks for the kind words about the exhibition. I’m really happy and excited about it and getting to do it.

Well to answer your questions, I was asked to curate a Front Room project by Laura Fried and Anthony Huberman. This is largely because I won the Frieze Writer’s Prize last year, but doing the internship there also had a lot to do with it. By interning, they got to see how I wrote about different artists and the kind of artists I was interested in, and I got a chance to prove myself to people who really do stuff in the art world (doing the intern grunt work with a smile on my face!).

Read the rest of this entry »