MICHAEL BELL-SMITH
ARTIST TALK + SCREENING
MICHAEL BELL-SMITH
ARTIST TALK + SCREENING
535 West 22nd Street, Fifth Floor, New York City
MICHAEL BELL-SMITH
ARTIST TALK + SCREENING
535 West 22nd Street, Fifth Floor, New York City
MICHAEL BELL-SMITH
ARTIST TALK + SCREENING
535 West 22nd Street, Fifth Floor, New York City
Works
Bell-Smith terms his re-edit of Eisenstein's iconic 1925 film The Battleship Potemkin a "sort of Cliff Notes condensation of the original narrative." He separates the film into its original shots, with each shot sped up or slowed down to the exact same length - one half of a second - and a frame of white added at each cut. The soundtrack was replaced with a minimal, one-second dance-beat loop synced to the cut; the result recalls dance visuals and music videos.
Chapters 1-12 of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet Synced and Played Simultaneously
Michael Bell-Smith
2005, 4:22 min, color, sound
To create this dense pop collage, Bell-Smith overlaid the first twelve parts of R. Kelly's soap opera/song cycle, Trapped in the Closet, playing them simultaneously. He writes, "I wanted to take this cultural object and amplify its peculiarity by folding the song and narrative onto itself." The result is a thick blur of overlapping forms and ghostly voices atop a plodding beat, all building to a chaotic crescendo and release.
Three Slideshows After Ed Ruscha and The Networked Computer
Michael Bell-Smith
2006, 7:07 min, color, silent
Writes the artist: "The idea behind these pieces was to re-imagine the approaches to photography and the archive Ed Ruscha displayed in his books, through the lens of a post-personal computer, post-Internet, post-Google image search age." To do so, Bell-Smith arranged images sourced from the Internet into three Powerpoint slideshows.
Video Created to Fix Stuck Pixels in Computer Monitors Recast (with Soundtrack and Sunset) as Video to Fix Your Stuck Mind
Michael Bell-Smith
2005, 45 sec, color, sound
In this work, Bell-Smith combines three found elements: an industrial video designed to fix stuck pixels in computer monitors, an animation of a sunset and a New Age soundtrack. In doing so Bell-Smith interrogates the purported transcendence of psychedelia and New Age techno-hippie-dom, while bringing into play the history of brainwashing videos and seizure-inducing strobe effects.
