Michael Bell-Smith

Biography

Michael Bell-Smith uses digital forms to explore contemporary visual culture and how it is mediated through popular technologies. His work often incorporates the visual vocabulary of the Internet, such as animated gifs and lo-resolution images, and references the aesthetics and semiotics of common computer programs such as Powerpoint or Web sites such as YouTube. Remixing and reinterpreting sources ranging from industrial videos and music clips to classic cinema and contemporary art, Bell-Smith reconsiders the cultural meaning of these materials in a "post-personal computer, post-Internet, post-Google" age.

In his single-channel video and Internet works, Bell-Smith often focuses on conceptually driven reedits and remixes of appropriated video or film material. Drawing structural inspiration from music remixes, Bell-Smith often deploys strategies derived from fan edits and the aesthetics of common computer programs.

In his screen-based gallery works, Bell-Smith combines hand-crafted digital drawings with disparate elements collected from low-resolution video games, animated gifs and other digital sources, crafting evocative digital animations that play with the notion of the sublime. The resulting dynamic landscapes and captured actions tease the viewer with the promise of a narrative; alluring visuals are poised between motion and stasis, representation and abstraction.

With a practice that ranges from screen-based works intended for the gallery to videos made for theatrical screenings and digital art created for an Internet audience, Bell-Smith's works also point to his interest in different modes of contemporary image production and distribution.

Michael Bell-Smith was born in 1978 in East Corinth, Maine. He received a BA in Art Semiotics from Brown University in 2001. His works have been seen in solo exhibitions at Foxy Production, New York; Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia, and LISTE 13, Basel, Switzerland, as well as in group shows at venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Macro Future, Rome, Italy; the Fifth Seoul International Media Art Biennale, South Korea; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Galleri F15, Moss, Norway; Threshold Artspace, Perth, Scotland; Vilma Gold, London; Glassbox, Paris; PROJEKT 0047, Berlin; Tate Liverpool, UK; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and BankART, Yokohama, Japan.

Bell-Smith lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.