Michael Bell Smith
Chapters 1-12 of R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet Synced and Played Simultaneously | 2005 | 4:22mins | BetaSP | USA
Michael Bell-Smith uses digital forms to explore contemporary visual culture and how it is mediated through popular technologies. His work often incorporates the visual vocabulary of the Internet (such as animated gifs and lo-resolution images) and references the aesthetics and semiotics of common computer programs such as Powerpoint or Websites such as YouTube. Remixing and reinterpreting sources ranging from industrial videos and music clips to classic cinema and contemporary art, Bell-Smith reconsiders the cultural meaning of these materials in a “post-personal computer, post-Internet, post-Google” age.
Michael Bell-Smith was born in 1978 in East Corinth, Maine. He received a BA in Semiotics from Brown University in 2001. His works have been seen in exhibitions at venues including The New Museum, New York; Foxy Production, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia; LISTE, Basel, Switzerland; Galeri F15, Moss, Norway; Threshold Artspace, Perth, Scotland; The Museum of Fine Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland; Vilma Gold, London; BankART, Yokohama, Japan; Glassbox, Paris; PROJEKT 0047, Berlin; and Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK. Bell-Smith lives and works in New York.
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To create this dense pop collage, Bell-Smith overlaid the first twelve parts of R. Kelly’s soap opera/song cycle, Trapped in the Closet, playing them simultaneously. He writes, “I wanted to take this cultural object and amplify its peculiarity by folding the song and narrative onto itself.” The result is a thick blur of overlapping forms and ghostly voices atop a plodding beat, all of which build to a chaotic crescendo and release.
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