British artist John Smith showed a selection of film and video work at Ikon Eastside. Each day a different piece or collection was screened including

Associations (1975)
A witty examination of the slippage between word and image.

The Girl Chewing Gum (1975)
A voice over directs a street scene in East London. As the director’s ability to move the sky and flocks of birds at will becomes apparent, the relationship between sound and image is fractured.

Om (1986)
A film about haircuts, clothes and image / sound relationships.

Gargantuan (1992)
Humorously combines scale and wordplay to show how meaning is dependent upon the framing of images.

Regression (1999)
A portrait of the artist as a not so young man. Smith attempts to enter the digital age by making a video version of one of his old films.

Black Tower (1985-7)
The viewer is drawn into the mystery of a man haunted by the recurring presence of a black tower.

Hotel Diaries (2001-4)
Hotel Diaries is a series of late night recordings made in foreign hotel rooms, all of which relate personal experiences to contemporary world events.

Lost Sound (with Graeme Miller) (1998 – 2001)
Lost Sound documents fragments of audio tape found on the streets of a small area of East London, combining the sound retrieved from each piece of tape with images of the place where it was found.

Ikon’s Eastside programme is kindly supported by Advantage West Midlands, Birmingham City Council, Business Link and the European Regional Development Fund.