Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Kingston University
Killing Time
1 Digital Video: 'Killing Time', 14” 32’, 4:3. Exhibited 13 March – 5 April 2008, Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand.
Subsequently exhibited: 10 June – 31 July 2010, Peer Gallery, London; 18 November 2011, Swedenborg Short Film Festival, Swedenborg Society, London; 2–4 September 2011, Quadrangle Film Festival, Kent .
Killing Time was an outcome of Smith’s funded residency at Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland (2006). The screened film, the only exhibit in a solo exhibition at the Gallery in 2008, is a documentary portrait of possum trapper, Mark Hutchings, filmed in situ at his cabin in Tokomaru Bay, New Zealand. Hutchings speaks on camera about his previous life as a hunter and his ongoing battle with nature. These accounts unfold firstly in relation to the hostile, inaccessible landscape of New Zealand’s bush, and then through references to the constitution of his own body, encompassing its deterioration and partial recovery from 245T herbicides which contaminated Hutchings drinking water.
Smith’s film investigates methods of representing the epic scale of landscape (unseen by the viewer) and its effect on the human psyche as mediated by Hutchings’ first hand account. Testing the conventions of documentary, Smith incorporates a still image approach which works against the moving nature of the medium and its organisation of narrative events. The purpose of this intervention is to intensify viewers’ engagement with the film’s subject, his shared experiences of a confining illness and the interwoven acts of imagination he uses to invoke a sense of place and space, and as a strategy for surviving the past and present. ‘Killing Time’ thus refers to the stillness of the film in contrast to Hutchings past occupation as a hunter who covered vast swathes of land in one day, and the reality of a life lived in the moment captured on film as Hutchings, trapped in his cabin, is now unable to live freely.
Subsequent premiere London, invited solo exhibition Peer Gallery 10/6-31/7/10; accompanying commissioned catalogue: ‘Nobody Else Even Knows’ (2010) essay by Richard Grayson. ISBN: 978-0-9560925-4-0; Public talk with curator Sacha Craddock, Peer Gallery (23 June 2010).
