Amanda L. Smith

Contemporary conceptions of space – the way we perceive, remember, and imagine it – are largely affected by film culture. As a painter, I am particularly interested in how the pervasiveness of film’s spatial language influences the way we create and read space in other visual formats. My work addresses common features of cinematic imagery in order to re-contextualize and reconsider the influence of film culture over our understanding of spaces. In most physical or virtual spaces, we interact with and understand space by first seeing it as a whole, and then focusing on its facets. Film reverses this process. In cinema, spaces are constructed through a slow accumulation of details, creating a didactic experience of location, position, and overall structure of place. This drawn-out and inverted approach requires an anchor, a homogenized visual language to orient spatial experience. Archetypical compositions, types of transitions, and vantage points echo from film to film, and have become a major determinant in how we individually envision or socially communicate space. Film is a reference and catalyst for analysis in my paintings -- visual information to break apart and synthesize into new worlds of my own invention. Looking at relationships between representational and abstracted space in both cinema and painting, I borrow the spatial cues normally specific to cinema to inform my painting process. I collage various places as portrayed in films, transferring the way cinematic environments are presented into the compressed, static space of a painting.