Melanie Smith (from Tate Modern)

Melanie Smith

Xilitla

I saw this artist's piece at the Tate Modern on my visit to London. I found the work to be very intriguing and very bizarre at the same time - the camera angles and the close-up shots were unusual and created a sense of movement around the space, also as if you were looking in hidden areas. The piece's main focus is looking at construction/dismantling a space. The film is projected vertically showing Las Pozas, a never completed surrealist-influenced architectural garden in Mexico built by Englishman Edward James. The piece expresses natural elements/environmental angles of the garden - there are aspects of distortion as the camera moves around the space and you can hear fragments of speech and sighting of people. The use of mirrors in the piece is really surreal as the mirrors obstruct the view of what can be seen.

 

"The juxtaposition of the strange with the banal is heightened by the rotated format to produce mesmerizing results. One curatorial contradiction is the bright light boxes telling us about each work; they interfere with a direct encounter of the works in their darkness."