Precariat Billboards - a series of temporal site specific works


Using abandoned shopping trolleys in Sydney streets I upcycle them to state facts about Australia’s invisible underclass rarely mentioned in the mainstream media. I then document this urban bricollage in situ both as photographs and as filmed performance pushing it up and down the street until a point of exhaustion is reached where it is finally left as an art intervention on the side of the road (in this case Edgeware Road, Enmore). See work-in-progress film here https://vimeo.com/150654794

"The value of what we discard, conceal and detain outlines the border of our collective culture. Thus the artist’s gesture of displaying a work of art in public space becomes one of defiance and generosity. In doing so, it confounds Duchamp’s exhortation to indifference to the aesthetics or origin of an object – it enforces direct interaction with the situation of appearance and context. Destructions should take place more rapidly.” YELLAM NRE,  2014. (Accessed Nov 2015 from Clusterfuck Aesthetics http://damienmintongallery.blogspot.com.au)

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Crystal Gaze


Crystal Gaze by Bernadette Smith from bernadette smith on Vimeo.

Digitised copy of a 1989 experimental 16mm movie film. These experiments in night light were inspired by a Native American creation story using a kind of magical realism. Written excerpts from an ancient Mayan text have been juxtaposed with the spoken reminiscences of an old man's life and death encounter in the the wilds of America. In a strange twist of mise-en-scene the camera assistant appears between choreographed takes whilst "bathing the eye with light to create stronger dreams". 3rd Week of Experimental Cinema, ARCO, Madrid official selection.



Film by Bernadette Smith.

Flute player and camera assistant: Pete Teller.
Storyteller: Johnny "the Castillean".

On Schizoid Farm

An experimental 16mm film made in 1987 and recently digitised. It follows a homeless schizophrenic in the streets of San Francisco. The word salad spoken monologue and real time photo animation are comprised of cut-ups of junk mail and magazines found on the street. The film explores the experience of social alienation and urban dislocation among the mentally ill. Rather than documentary techniques it uses magical realism to interpret reality.

film by Bernadette Smith with thanks to Robert Fox and Jerome Carolfi

YOU!

This is an experimental 16mm hand-coloured, scratched and collaged film that uses snippets of sixties corporate training films and cartoons that have been altered and reconstructed. It spoofs social conditioning in the workforce and deconstructs underlying power relationships. Techniques have been borrowed from the sixties California avant-gards film movement and French inspired Situationist detournement.

Newcastle Cold War secret

Chance Encounters

Under sunny, blue skies and the all-controlling gaze of the state you soon learn that if you don't laugh you'll only cry...

more at http://workmakesyoufree.blogspot.com.au/

Work Makes You Free

Work Makes You Free This edgy black satire, imbued with the zeitgeist of the impending Occupy mass protest movement, follows the travails of Connie a disabled welfare recipient struggling for the right to exist while navigating Australia's misanthropic welfare system. Using stand-up comedy as a weapon for the oft-silenced voice of the other, Connie tells a story of underclass survival. Using the visual language of aesthetic formalism to radically interrogate the status quo, this film exposes the dehumanising regime that is Australia’s dark underside. Work Makes You Free completed in 2012 is an 8 minute 58 second HD digital personal film.