Martin Smith was born, educated and creates his work in Brisbane and has been exhibited as a solo artist since 2000 throughout Australia as well as in Japan, France and the USA (Sophie Gannon Gallery).
Viewed as an ensemble, Smith’s postmodern work is a mobile autobiographical self-portrait constructed of layered stories and which embody memory and loss.
Smith achieves these effects not solely through his photographs as this is not “…traditional photography [as it] incorporat[es] text and collage…” (Ryan Renshaw Gallery), scrubbing out parts of an image, as well incorporating sculpture and elements of installation art.
Firstly, considering the photography viewed on their own, the subject matter of these large images, up to 2m in length in his 2009 works, is mundane; featuring empty urban interiors and exteriors in pallid palettes. Smith selects his images from his on-going obsessive documentation of places he has visited, a process he began in his teenage years (Robb, 2008, p.3). This can include using photos from other family members, such as in some of his earliest work (see the series
I’ll See you Next Thursday, 2000) using landscapes taken by his deceased sister collaged with Smith’s portraits of family members (Rees in Smith, 2008, p.10) and his silhouettes using park scenery, see
Enter the Dragon (2005) or the earlier series
You could give them a better life than I ever could (2003) also inspired by his sister’s death.
The second key element in much of his work, the text, is often hand-cut into the selected photo and consists of either appropriated song lyrics (Hoffie, 2008, p.34) or a moment from a recent personal story or from a youthful memory (Van Helten, 2008). Rees (in Smith, 2008, p.8) sees this cutting as an echo of adolescent self-harm while Robb (ibid) points out that Smith’s choices of textualised memories are awkward and anti-heroic:
…[ showing Smith] as he navigates the complexities of social relations: social faux pas, backyard mishaps, romantic fumblings and altercations with roommates…[in the sort of] micro narratives through which we provide a progressive portrait [over time] to our loved ones. (pp.4-5)
For instance,
The Gardeners (2006) features this story cut into an image of a Dolphin show:
During my high school years my brother was in a band called The Gardeners they used to practise under our house every weekend. At the same time my sister was training for the Paralympics in javelin, shot put and discus. The Gardeners had been advertising for a bass player and this guy turned up at our house for the audition in a Gemini panel van. He parked it in the backyard and started playing. Every weekend at around 2.00pm I started to get a little bored and today I started looking at the shot put.
I was a weak kid who had trouble with power and after assessing the situation I surmised that the bass player’s car was way out of my shot put range. I gave a perfunctory heave and the shot landed well short. High with confidence that I could never throw the 8.8 pound metal ball that far I gave it a good old-fashioned roost.
After that all I can remember was that my body transformed from a two tonne Bulgarian goofed up on horse tranquillisers, to a swift gazelle so fast that by the time the unmistakeable sound of a shot put smashing the rear window of a visiting bass player’s Gemini panel van reached my ears I was already living under an assumed name in a small Indonesian archipelago.
Where Smith uses lyrics, Robb (2008) notes, that they are often from songs featuring “notions of [masculine] estrangement and isolation…[explored via]…natural imagery” (p.5). For instance,
Ronald Desmond (2004), is an image of the horizon over which run Johnny Cash’s lyrics for
I Walk the Line while over the fuzzy office interior of
Just for One Day (2005) is inscribed David Bowie’s
We Could Be Heroes. Rees (in Smith, 2008, p.8) adds that there is nothing “celebratory” about Smith’s use of lyrics, but there is a lonely “confessional” quality.
Typically, however, neither the image’s title nor the text relate directly to the image or explain it. Instead, each element serves as a trigger to inter-relating memories. Thus, while text is selected carefully to add additional layers of meaning, this meaning is added through subtraction: the words and their sense are there, but the structure, the letters, are gone, cut away. However, it is also significant that these two elements together can make the image hard to see and the text hard to read – as an audience, Smith requires us to do some conscious work.
It should be noted here that not all Smith’s work features cut-out text. Since 2007 Smith has directly subtracted from some photos by scrubbing them with sandpaper, see
Geisha, 2007. These are images from his travels from which the tourists have been removed, leaving only the object of their desire: the reason they came in the first place. Smith displays the dust from his scrubbing with the image as “the ashes of eradicated individuals” (Rees in Smith, 2008, p.10).
Finally, as installation art, if not dust, then Smith’s work often features the lettering cut-outs from the photograph. These may be arranged beneath the work as in his breakthrough work,
Ronald Desmond (2004), created after the death of this father which features this hand-cut lettering for the first time (Hoffie, 2008, p.3). After this moment, Smith starts to move away from his collage work that layers photos together (see
I knew she’d be leaving soon, 2005 and his series
I’ll see you next Thursday, 2000). Alternatively, if not used to extend the viewing plane of the photograph to the floor (see
Primavera exhibition, 2007) or loose within the frame (Van Helten, 2008) such as in
Feeling a Little Uncomfortable (2006), then the cut-out lettering may be recycled into new works. This may be two dimensional works where letters are glued onto photos (
Wasted, 2009) or abstracts arranged on blank canvases (see his series,
Also with you, 2009). Alternatively, he may create three dimensional sculptural works by pinning letters to soft toys (Eltham, 2008), see
In Response to Using Conversation with a Therapist (2008). In these cases of recycling, in contrast to the photographs, while the letters are present; the original story is lost in a jumble. However, in some cases he leaves photography behind completely and carves sentences into objects such as souvenir-type statues (
I Lived with Jesus for a year and put on 10 kilos, 2009) or cricket bats (
Are you waiting for the darkness Daddy, 2008).
It is important to note that this laborious lettering practice gives Smith’s work a “sculptural quality” (Ryan Renshaw Gallery, 2009) that resists the notion of photography as art in an instant; as an aura-less medium of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin, 2005 [1936]). Conversely, through his hole-making Smith also calls attention to the technology of photography and its mechanical habit of converting subjects into objects. In other words, through his cutting we see through the spatial illusions of the camera lens and the work of art and we see Smith as an objectified subject (Robb, 2008. p.4).
Further, Robb (2008) sees another dimension in Smith’s work when he cites Barthes’ argument that links photography with memory and melancholia: “…by making absence present: [photography] shows us here and now, what once was elsewhere” (p.3). Hence, these expressions of loss (of stories, memories, youth, meaning, his father, his sister, a preferred childhood and so on) are evoked through his combination of empty places and cut-out text from which the words (or stories) are physically lost (Ryan Renshaw Gallery, 2009).
Thus, through these layers of meaning, planes of viewing, the altering of images by text (or the text by the images), the loss and jumbling of words and the difficulty in seeing the work through the cutting, it could be argued that Smith’s transforming and re-transforming of his own memories evokes the way memory itself works: “…memories are left behind…and [are] turned into other things, it’s a language constantly getting churned up” (Smith in Eltham, 2008).
And, indeed, Robb (2008, p.6) perceives this turning into other things throughout Smith’s artistic practice which continually invokes memory either through re/studying his collection of photos or “…suggest[s] places that can in turn be photographed or evoked via reconstruction.” Further, because of Smith’s re-cyclical process, Robb even sees this layering through variations in photographic technique and film stock that refuse so show a normal progression over time as Smith moves fluidly between documenting self over time and creating fictions.
In conclusion, through Smith’s artistic process, the brief act of taking a photograph in the now becomes self-reflexive and ambiguous as each photo is “…loaded with the past and the future…just like one memory is laid upon another, or one version of a story embellishes another” (Ryan Renshaw Gallery, 2009).
