Sam Smith
A circuit
10 years: new space, new beginning! In 2017, 3+1 Arte Contemporânea Gallery celebrates its 10-year anniversary. To commemorate this we have decided to move to another location, a bigger space (morethan 400 square meters) with three exhibition rooms, two storage spaces and an office.
The exhibition that opens the new gallery, on the 19th of January 2017 from 7pm till 10pm, is A Circuit by Australian artist, currently living in London, Sam Smith (b.1980, Sydney), that presents a recent series of sculpture and film works.
A Circuit presents a group of interlocking works that circle around two Modernist villas built in the 1920s: Le Corbusier’s Villa Le Lac (1923-24) and Eileen Gray’s E.1027 (1926-29). The video and sculptural works dissect components from the architecture of both waterside houses, utilizing their plans as a means of uncovering the design convergences and history of conflict between the two creators.
Gray’s villa was constructed as a statement of unity with her then lover Jean Badovici, but this harmony was destroyed when Le Corbusier (a close friend of Badovici) painted a series of unsolicited murals on the white walls of the house. The 3D works on show abstract the floor plans of E.1027 into a series of sculptural furnishings as a gesture towards restoring the architecture to its original purity. The largest of these objects holds an infinite water-feature which marks the progression of time and the proximity of the house to the Mediterranean Sea where Le Corbusier died.
Villa Le Lac was commissioned by Le Corbusier’s parents and is a dialogue between two apertures: a long 11 metre ribbon window facing the lake, creating views like a celluloid filmstrip; and a squarer unglazed frame cut into the exterior garden wall. Mirroring this, The Horizontal Window (2016) is shot in two ratios and projected onto a three-dimensional screen built from the geometry of their intersection: 1.33:1, the original 35mm silent film ratio; and 2.35:1, the 35mm anamorphic ratio of CinemaScope. The video embraces the 20th century shift towards horizontal frames as architectural windows and the cinematic celluloid frame both widened. Within the exhibited works, layers of history and narrative are intertwined to explore the associations between the two architecture villas and filmic language.
Smith combines historical fact with fiction to open views on possible futures. Sam Smith currently lives and works in London and holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths (2015). Recent solo projects include E.1027, Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Horizontal Window, The Telfer Gallery for Glasgow International (2016); Slow Form, CAV – Centro de Artes Visuais, Coimbra, Portugal; Slow Fragmentation, Screen Space, Melbourne; NOTES, Australian Centre for Moving Image, Melbourne (2015); The Performative Minute, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Notes on the Apparatus,
selected by Vdrome for the Artists’ Film Biennial, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Frames of Reference, The Royal Standard as part of their Liverpool Biennial 2014 programme; and Form Variations, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2014).
Group shows include, Assembly Point, London; Ways of Looking, Gallery of Contemporary Art, E-WERK, Freiburg; Objects from the Temperate Palm House, Bargain Spot, Edinburgh (2016); Your Time Is Not My Time, De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam; TOMROM, Sandefjord Kunstforening and Larvik Kunstforening, Norway; this place is really nowhere at Jupiter Woods, London; Framework 6: parallelisms, insitu, Berlin; and How far is here, MAGO, Norway (2015). In 2017 he will undertake a residency at Baltic Art Center, Sweden as part of Spaced 3: north by southeast.
19.01.17 – 04.03.17
Opening 19.01.17, 19h – 22h