Craig Smith uses the photographic to provide a comprehensive ‘demonstration’ image. The ‘demonstration’ image is an organised, totalised set of procedural methods. These methods are intended to outline the successive steps necessary to stage an audience’s encounter with an artwork and with an artist. A demonstration image allows the photograph to operate like a witness, calling out with an exaggerated sense of the circumstances leading to its production.
In the Swim Turns Craig Smith and Colin Beatty used the momentum of Massachusetts Water Taxis to suspend themselves upon the surface of the Boston Harbor. Upon suspension the artists performed a series of choreographed movements along with newly emerging, spontaneous movements. These movements were intended to moderate the visual demonstration of the human body opposed or in confluence with forces of gravity and sources of momentum.
Turnaround/ Stepover. Boston Harbour 2008. Digital C-Print
Stepover 2. Boston Harbour 2008. Digital C-Print
By doing so Smith and Beatty's move erupt upon the surface which suspends them. Not aerial, not submerged, but suspended through repeating, durational exercises. This application of the photographic as a ‘demonstration’ of the body and surface is an attempt by the artist to visually compose the total and complete system of a relational artwork. Such a composition includes a visual record of the event and of the sentiment and dialogue that can exist between an image and a viewer.
No comments:
Post a Comment