Nick Smith, It’s A Done Deal
3 December, 6-9pm + 4 December, 12-6pm
Nick Smith is a London based artist, who having recently completed his month long residency has been exploring the nuances between architecture and community. Looking at the relationships people have with spaces and buildings and the classist issues that can often centre these conversations.
“I have this distant memory of going to see one of the council tower blocks being demolished by implosion when I was a kid, I think it was in Croxteth, Liverpool but I can’t be certain. I remember it being this spectacle that was just too big and powerful to comprehend - an absolute visual euphoria that has always stuck with me. Using this image as a starting point I have been collating footage over the last few years of the demolition and have then expanded that out to getting as many clips of council tower blocks being demolished through implosion as possible.
There are a lot of confusing messages these images portray for me they mark the beginning of a major shift in public to private ideologies within the UK. But when I try to think about back then, I think a lot of people saw this as a kind of exorcism from being poor or oppressed by mundanity.
To balance these images out I have also been creating an archive of photographs and videos that I have taken of architecture that has both private and social housing within the same complex. These are mostly taken in the hallways and spaces that join the private to the public housing. These are quite unassuming spaces but are charged with a tension that I think of like a kind of social static and I try to capture that either within the image or the edit.
I have spent the residency making sense of these two bodies of research and trying to just think visually and materially, which has been very hard but very liberating at the same time. There is a pitch perfect but weighty context within Gildengate that I have thrived off, it's within the architecture and it’s present especially at night time, change is obviously about to come ripping through this community, but for now it’s serene, bathed in the white noise of traffic.
It’s A Done Deal.”
Image Credit: Nick Smith
