Full Transcript:
Dot Zhihan Jia: So next is Nick Smith. So Nick was born in Liverpool. He explores themes of class within the context of the built environment through video collage and photographic installations. His archive of photographs, videos, and research materials compiled from his work, both as an artist, but also as a property inspector. And these materials serve as his primary source materials. He creates images that evoke a sense of connection between past and present to focus on moments of arrival or departure in a public space, regional identity, memory and recent history. Some recent solo shows and group presentations include at Turf project in Croydon, Open City Documentary Festival in London this year (2024) and at the Queens Gallery in Leicester in England last year. Okay, we’ll hear from Nick then.
Nick Smith: Thank you very much, Dot. It's nice to be here.
Nick Smith: Yes, so My name's Nick and as Dot was saying, I'm from Liverpool and I've lived in London for 21 years and I was also living in Liverpool for 21 years as well. So I'm at this really interesting point in my life where I'm equidistant from where I was from and where I live. So I'm desperately trying not to have an identity crisis, essentially.
So I graduated in 2012 and I was not very satisfied with what our education gives you.
And it didn't quite feel like I had the confidence to start a practice or call myself an artist. So I decided to start a publishing house, well, a magazine project, where I basically did three magazines that were exhibitions in and of themselves.
And with this project, I invited artists that I admired or was interested in.
And I was interested in subverting those things that they teach you in art school. So taking those big philosophical terms and simplifying them. So they were named simply after each term. So one of them was themed Drift, which was an interpretation of Guy Debord's Dérive. One of them was titled Surface, which was a version of object-oriented ontology. And I invited artists to make work specifically for the page. And it grew out of a residency I had in Los Angeles, where I became very interested in art publishing out there. But I thought I'd talk about that as a nice introduction to how I started my practice. So I was quite disillusioned with art, is what I was trying to say. And I never really met anyone in art that was like me or where I was from.
And I took a few years out from being an artist. And I came across a gallery called Output Gallery in Liverpool, and it was run by a person called Gabrielle de la Puente, who's also part of the White Pube. And it was just nice to talk to someone that was from where I was from. And I pitched an idea to her and she gave me my first proper professional gig. And the title of that was Where Were You When It Was Shit and it was centred on a film that took into consideration lots of moments in the history of Liverpool, from the Toxteth Riots to the Garden Festival in Dingle, Quadrant Park, Kirkby Rent strikes, and Richard and Judy, and also the Docker strikes as well. The idea was that there was a political instance on the left-hand side of the screen, and then there was a celebratory instance on the right-hand side of the screen. And there's a saying going around at the moment that I really like, which is ‘two opposing ideas can exist at the same time’. I think I'm very interested in that as I think the world in which we live and where social media is pushing us all down this one way of thinking. You either think one thing or you think another.
I try and use my work to have two contrasting ideas exist on the same surface.
I like what that does to... I like what that does to the viewer, essentially. So here you've got a policeman that's being dealt with in Toxteth and the picket fence from the Royal Festival, the garden festivals in Dingle. So the garden festival is interesting because that was commissioned by Michael Heseltine with the money he was meant to put into Toxteth to better the environment for the people that live there. Then as part of that project, as part of that exhibition, I did a piece called In the Northwest It Rains, and It Rains, and It Rains. That utilised offcuts from the film, but also it was all basically stuff from Granada TV and then images from my archive overlaid. They're printed on film and there's two images – there's one image on each film, and then they're compressed between glass. It's interesting seeing how terrestrial TV dictates the narrative or is what their priorities were back in the '90s. There was an AIDS campaign, and there was also, weirdly, advertisements for a local club called Quadrant Park.
So that was the exhibition, which, sadly, was closed after four days due to the local lockdown. And because of that, they invited me to make a piece of work about that situation. So I made this film called Within Years, which takes into consideration lots of moments in Liverpool's history. But interestingly, working with a local writer called Niloo Sharifi, and they did a lot of research into the Liverpool City Archives and found that there was similar riots during the cholera outbreak in the 1800s, and we made this video together.
[Extract from video]:
'In point of fact, the poor man, so far from contributing less than others in way of taxation, contributes much more according to his means. As the Bull of the Saying is, ‘he pays through the nose for everything that he uses’. In buying his tea, sugar, coffee in the smallest quantity, he pays an enhanced price. The difference between his method of supplying himself and that of the man who can procure what he wants in larger quantities is probably from 13 to 20% in favour of the latter. At the great reform meeting on Monday last, Mr Ralph Stevenson said on this subject, ‘Ellensborough bearing, Carnival and others call the people rabble, vagabonds, ragamuffins. I have often asked these gentlemen, pray, who fights your battles and defends your properties? And above all, who pays the taxes? Why, these poor people who are vilified and abused, to be sure.’
Nick Smith: So the film is nine minutes long, and there's just this really interesting contrast between a historical event and a contemporary event. And the underlying theme is paranoia around information that the government are giving the working classes. And that's something that people from Liverpool are very justifiably paranoid about. And all this work is about the politics in Liverpool. But I think the main misinterpretation of that city is that it's not a political city, it's a rebellious one. That's because no one choses to be political in that city, it's inflicted on us, and then we rebel from that.
That was really interesting for me, that whole experience, because what it made me realise is that this industry is... I always used to think, Oh, it's galleries you have to go for or whatever, but actually it's relationships with people. That taught me that because I was working with the gallery, and then the gallery went away, and then I was working with the person. When we did that film, everything was locked down. I was just really lucky in that that person that I was working with is the best person at social media in the industry so it was quite good in the end – it gave me a bit of momentum and a bit of attention.
And off the back of that Outpost Gallery invited me to make a piece of work in response to their studios being under threat of being demolished. The space is this place called Gildengate House in the rough bit of Norwich. Norwich has a rough bit, believe it or not. And the room is 25 meters by 8 meters. It's this ginormous space. I made this trompe-l'oeil, or however you say that word, that French word. I filled the room with dry ice and documented it over a period of a week and documented that process. I like how it alludes to demolition or fire. There is a really interesting potency to that work, I thought. I think it's still under threat from being demolished. People still aren't sure what's going on with it. I think it's been bought, and it's a really banal architecture, and I find that banal architecture is super interesting because there's this amalgam-ised modernism in it. And I think it's really, really overlooked. And it's nice to... It's really nice to respond to those spaces as an artist. And as well, what I really like is what I realised since being here is that actually I worked and I've worked on commissions a lot. I never considered these commissions until I started to be in the studio and be around other artists that work in different ways. And I realised, Oh, I'm working on commissions here. Because I thought I'll come into the studio here and be like this studio artist, but I think I work to commissions well.
I think that's my thing. I didn't realise until I started thinking about this. I think I like that because I like to have a job. I like to feel like I'm employed to something, and I think an artist can be an employed person. So along with that, I did this series of montage works, which are from my job, I basically spend a lot of time in new build properties. And these are corridors that join public housing to private housing in the same block. So I'm either in the private bit, looking towards the public section or the public bit, looking back to the private section. And there's usually a door that separates the two. And they're printed on just A4 paper. The grid is the border of the print. So when you print on a Xerox printer, there's a natural border. It then has created this grid which I like as a sort of gesture to high art. I really like it when those little domestic things, if you put them together in a certain way, become full within the language of high art. That's something I really enjoy with this work. So there are 32 sheets of A4 each, so they're like AA0, I think.
After that, I made a film about the shift from capitalism to modernism via the built environment, which takes on a lot of different roles, but I think it's like an index or a biography of the tower block. It's currently on show just in the project space. So I thought I'd just gloss over that and tell you to go and see the film.
So I started the award here in September, and I couldn't believe I got it because Number one, my name is so incredibly boring. Or as my mate said when he came in and seen the list on the wall, he said, It's like going to a Michelin-star restaurant and serving a ham sandwich at the bottom. [Laughter from audience] I've been thinking a lot about what I'm going to do next. I've used the first year to just basically create a bit of time for myself and step back and think about what my position is and what I want to do. I've used my time to make outrageous requests to curators to get big institutions in. None have said yes yet, unfortunately. If anyone is in here from a big institution, come and say hello.
I've been thinking about London and I've been thinking about what London is. I spend a lot of time in the city, wandering around in buildings and stuff. So I have this very... I meet loads of different people. I meet super wealthy people that own big properties and I meet the cleaner. So I meet this big cross-section of the city And I think a big mistranslation of London is it's sophisticated, or I think Liverpool is way more sophisticated than London, to be honest with you, but I think London is a very crass city. I think it's a service economy, and you're either rich or you service the rich. I was thinking, what's the space that is a metaphor for that? I spend a lot of time in foyers. I thought, Oh, that's interesting. The foyer is probably a metaphor for that. It's delivery drivers, it's service people, it's plumbers, it's food delivery people meeting people that live there. And the people that live there aren't always rich, but it's a great metaphor for that transaction. I've decided to use the rest of the award to develop this research and into a broader conversation. What really interests me about these spaces is the older ones, like in Maida Vale in St John's Wood and stuff or Marylebone, they're walking into a film set. And then the new ones are walking into a simulation, walking into an image.
I'm interested in working with a writer on this and investigating. I want it to be a film, and I want it to be a room as well. So I want it to be not in a high-tech way, but in a way that can really play with that idea of the virtual and the real or the image and the room or this idea of what these spaces allude to. They always allude to the city beyond it or they allude to a lifestyle. And the new ones have this weird relationship to well-being and self-care and health in that relationship to capitalism. There's something really interesting going on with them anyway. I thought it would be interesting to work with a writer to flesh that out, like from an anthropological perspective, but also from a hallucinatory perspective as well. A couple of artists I've been looking at is this group called Archizoom, and they made a city on a typewriter. They did the plan of an entire city just using a typewriter, and I think there was a computer informing it.
It's like a critique of the banality of the city. That's just a really interesting work that I've been thinking of in terms of the relationship between image and place. Then Richard Hamilton as well and his prints. Always experimental, always fascinating, and always a great relationship between space and image. These are just works I'm thinking about at the moment. I've I've developed the idea a little bit. I think what I'm going to do is make an inventory of the kind of objects that you find in these spaces, but not to just document them on a camera or whatever, but to actually imagine them. I've been using Midjourney to imagine the objects that I remember in these spaces. The new places have book shelves with modern trinkets on, like perfume bottles and candles and all that crap. But they have these objects as well, which I'm very attracted to, which allude to art history, but also lifestyle. I'm very conceptual, I guess, with the way I work. That's something else I've realised being here. But I'm using Midjourney as an extension of my imagination. I'm trying to remember these objects via this AI software. Then I think what I'll do is I'll make a load of these objects and then work with a writer to animate them.
Then with that writing, I'll use it as an architecture to hang images on to build the film. What I do is I get the image in Midjourney, then I'll print it out on a Xerox printer and chop it up, stick it on a piece of paper and then scan it back in just so it feels a bit more real. That's where I'm up to with everything. I think that's me.
