John Smith is one of my favorite experimental film artists. He’s based in the UK and studied at the Royal College of Art. He’s perhaps best know for “Girl Chewing Gum” (1976), where he takes documentary footage of a common street, and then adds the voice-over of a movie director trying to direct the action. Thus, like most of his films, it seriously questions the medium (and its relationship to truth) while creating a comic effect. That can also be said of “Associations,” which focuses in on the split between visual and linguistic readings. It operates in the genre of “word films,” which I’m particularly fond of, and underscores the absolute ambiguity of spoken words. –Paul Young

Artists web site John Smith

Gallery: Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin
VDB.org