John Smith

Fine Arts, Sydney is exhibiting the work of John Smith, ‘The Girl Chewing Gum’, a 12 minute black and white film with sound made in 1976. The work is shown in the gallery its original format, projected on 16mm film.

‘The Girl Chewing Gum’ comprises just two shots: a continuous long view of a busy urban street and a shorter view of countryside, voiced-over with authoritative scenic direction that progresses to unreliable narration. ‘The Girl Chewing Gum’ is renowned as a work of avant-garde filmmaking for aspects that include its attention to the materiality of film, playfulness with conventions of narrative cinema, relationships between image and language, and perceptions of documentary and fiction. Smith’s work is inspired by longstanding interests in conceptual art and structural film, with a fascination for the power of narrative and spoken word.

16 October — 9 November, 2019