Fifteen Minutes of Sublime Meditation

In terms of visual language, the video is a turning point in the artist’s practice as it is made up exclusively of stock images and archival clips. Lock-down conditions led Smith to an “economy of the image” through which she reproduces the visual regime that inhabits the digital realm emphasizing the strictly virtual origin of most of the images. Compulsive saturation and repetition generate a kind of flattening of the information that erases any reference of scale or hierarchy. Faced with this apparent visual chaos, Smith introduces a purely plastic element through the use of color. The moving image suddenly appears veiled, flat, and appeased by a chromatic uniformity where each color defines a particular category: green for nature, blue for technology, pink for the body, orange for violence. It is this step -or space- between the moving image and the pictorial plane that traverses her whole oeuvre.