Bridget Smith: Cosmos

Frith Street Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Bridget Smith. Using photography and film Smith creates images of both real and constructed spaces – locations where one can easily lose oneself.

Much of Smith’s work deals with escaping from the everyday world and a series of images inspired by the outer reaches of the universe continues this theme. The film Cosmos creates a scene from outer space using particles of dust floating in a beam of light. Photographs showing two of the most easily found constellations in the night sky; Orion, The Great Hunter and Ursa Major, also known as The Great Bear or Big The Dipper are perhaps the most easily identifiable constellations in the night sky – Smith imagines them as an anchor – as a way to place oneself in the vast tracts of deep space.

A new film Monitoring Space captures an individual’s fascination with outer-space. Shot at the Mills Observatory in Dundee it focuses on what it means to be obsessed with another reality and how that effects one’s everyday life.

Deserts are also places which are somehow apart from reality – they present an inhospitable and uninhabited environment. In Smith’s photographs the extreme light of the desert is replaced by a milky unclear haze that heightens the deadening nature of the landscape. Traces of tracks remain revealing past excursions into the never-ending expanse.