Always Almost But Not Quite
Brenton Alexander SmithExhibition Opening Wednesday October 7th, 6 PM (via Facebook livestream)
Exhibition Continues October 9th to October 24th, 2020
This installation of video sculpture aims to elicit feelings of sympathy, perhaps entangled with revulsion, to the detritus of car wrecks. The sculptural forms are made from wiring looms obtained from within car wrecks. They represent the internal workings of a car - inverted: a fragile interior spilling out.
Human figures are absent here, yet there is a peculiar sense of the anthropomorphic in both the sculptural forms and the entities that move across the screens enshrined within them. The forms on the screens were made by subverting the intended use of the driving game, BeamNG.drive. By pushing the system in ways never intended, the videogame becomes a platform for creating time-based artworks where the car – its purpose and its movements – becomes something other. It is in this other space that something more-than-car emerges: entities Smith refers to as crashforms.
The crashforms have the potential to elicit affective responses through their strange movements. Attempts to categorise a crashform often result in a collection of not-quites; their erratic behaviours evoke human or animal qualities, but these perceptions often last only a moment before the crashforms recombine into something else.
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Image: Brenton Alexander Smith, The Soft Crash, 2020. video still.
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