With the release of her new short film Black Box Investigations, I spoke with Vancouver-based filmmaker & visual artist Paige Smith about her body of work, subjectivities of the human body itself, contexts & mediums, and the joys of playful interaction in art.
Enjoy.
D: Your newest work, Black Box Investigations, plays like something of a natural apex of your numerous films, installations, & photographs to date, which from my observation, involves a preoccupation with your own identity - and the ones you share with others - as it bumps up with larger structural forces. Having traversed through multiple disciplines over the course of a decade (or longer), what brought you to this very project?
P: When you're 18 and you just start film school, you just start art school, or you just start anything, you're trying to figure out yourself. It's really hard to determine what you want to say as an artist.
So it was like, okay, I got to figure out what I want to say, you learn all these technical skills, you learn all this theory, you hear about all these other amazing artists and it's like, well, who am I? And why do I need to add to this conversation? So for a lot of my early work and what I was starting, I was really looking at the medium itself because that's what I was learning in school was medium.
So I was really interested in the apparatus of filmmaking and how that in and of itself frames and influences what we see. That fascinated me and was my starting point. The way I put that more simply nowadays is that I'm interested in context.
I'm interested in what lies beyond the frame, what lies behind the frame, who makes what device it's made with, you know, that these choices aren't neutral or objective. The choice of what kind of camera you use doesn't just influence the options of settings you can have, but is manufactured and created from an industry and from companies and from individuals that have a certain objective in mind. I'm not saying it's some nefarious thing, but Canon has an objective of what kind of image they're trying to make possible with the kinds of cameras they develop, so it's just that. I'm just always thinking about context.
For this work, I went back to school during the pandemic to do this diploma program in visual art, and I was taking a photography class. We were doing this reading. It was like the philosophy of photography or something. I forget the name of it. It was just really interesting because he was talking about photography through philosophy. So I was really inspired by this reading because I love thinking about context and I love thinking about the medium of filmmaking.
For Black Box Investigations, I was really fascinated by this term the writer comes up with, comparing a camera to a black box, like a black box is a device or a system where you can put A into this black box and know you'll get B, but you don't know exactly what's happening in the middle, and that's kind of what being a filmmaker is like. There's so much technology involved in our art making and there are people that definitely do know the inside of the black box, but there are very, very few of those people who know everything within the black box.
I was just interested in this, making us more aware of that context of a camera. And like my own identity, I don't know. It's something I struggle with more and more, to parse in my own artwork, but it is something in the last few years now I've been working with myself in front of the camera. Originally it was just out of practicality. It was just, okay, I'm here. I don't need to find someone else to do the idea in front of the camera. It's also a practicality matter because when you're making films that don't make money or very little money, I don't have much I can offer an actor or performer, and the types of things that I have to get.
Being recorded in front of the camera is not something they benefit for an actor's reel or something. Eating a camera on film isn't like- no one's going to use that in their actor's reel you know! While I wouldn't say it's like my identity per se, I think that that's not what interests me about it. But, I think that what I’ve come to realize is that, that in of itself is a context, if that makes sense. That I myself as the artist, I'm not neutral either, and I think that's partly why I’m trying to offer this transparency. That's just me in front of the camera. In Black Box Investigations, I have these shots where you see the disposable camera and then you see what the disposable camera sees.
And part of that is like, okay, there's my camera, I'm filming with my little Canon DSLR. There's my living room. There's my dirty kitchen. I'm trying to be transparent in that way. So maybe my own body and self is part of that transparency.
Stills from Black Box Investigations (2023)
D: There exists a polarity, if not tension, between capture formats from consumer digital to disposable film that I can’t help but perceive as self-reflexively motivated. In the film, we can see camera bodies anatomized alongside yours, and the organic & inorganic is rendered through a symbiosis of sorts. Thematically and aesthetically, it evokes relation to your previous works The Big Reveal (2022) & Tethered Connection (2022) in how human features are printed, coded, or overlaid with the artifacts of other elements. Can you speak more about this?
P: … If only you could write my grant applications. I'm definitely playing with this idea. I'm trying to play with this idea of a camera body versus a human body. And questioning in just the same way I was saying in the last question, this lack of neutrality, this lack of objective. Truth in a camera's ability to capture the world in the same way I think a human body would. Our eyes aren't neutral in the sense that physiologically, we all see differently.
I just think in this less specific sort of way, like the words organic versus inorganic, I'm drawn to that in what you're talking about, because there's also this fluidity that I'm interested in, in playing with when making art. I heard it in some class somewhere, but someone was talking about this desire to create solid art, where you know exactly what you're going to get at the end. You have an image in your brain, of a photo you want to capture, and then you go and you create it and you capture it. Like what a digital photography pipeline is. It's a great example of that. And then if you compare that to analog photography where you would then go into this middle process where you'd go into the dark room and you'd have to work with all the chemicals to develop. You can become a scientist of it. You can become really precise. But you can't 100 percent control it. You know what I mean? And there's something about trying to break down that divide, if that makes sense. Like, I want to play in this fluid space.
Maybe another way to explain it is I'm very fascinated by this Cartesian model of fluid space. The body and the brain being seen as separate and as distinct entities and I'm very much against that. It feels very inhuman almost. It's like the brain was seen as the masculine and the body was seen as the feminine and there's a bunch of other parts too, but just even that, like this organic versus inorganic, these black and white categorizations even, that's what I mean by fluid. I'm trying to play in this gray, messy middle area.
Tethered Connection (2022)
The Big Reveal (2022)
D: I think what you're getting at is that between our perception and the camera's perception, that there is an experiential abstract in between there that those two things can capture only on their own and so by pitting them against one another, you edge closer to whatever that in-between thing is.
P: Yeah! And another way I sometimes explain it is like, I don't think there is an objective truth, to anything, honestly. Maybe that's too bold to say, but in a lot of cases, I don't think there's objective truth to everything. But I think there's poetic truth. I think that's what I'm more interested in exploring in art is this kind of poetic truth. I don't want to make artwork that is a science paper or journalism or something where you can read it and cognitively process and understand it. But I want something where people can viscerally understand it. And then I still think that that's truth seeking and that's still almost like knowledge making too.
I didn't mean for this last film, Black Box Investigations, to be about the body, but because making art for me is so much about being in my body, it's like when you write a paper, I'm not thinking about how my body feels at all, but when I'm making artwork, I'm trying to viscerally be in tune with my emotions because that's how I can be like is this working or not so it's hard for that to not end up in the work somehow. The Big Reveal and Tethered Connections seem like they’re more explicitly about the body because they're about sexuality. I just think that's my background, so it's always going to be there somehow in my work.
And I think what you're getting at is the real challenge of artistic expression, because obviously this expands across all these different mediums and fields, and so it's like, whatever that is that's visceral that's in here that you're trying to express, you're trying to figure out. Like, do I express that with the camera? Do I do that with a pencil or any words? That's really it.
D: It's like, how are you translating the thing?
P: Yeah, that's what it is. That's the perfect word. It's like you're translating. That to me is kind of what making art is. That's why I also think art isn't complete, and some people might argue with this, but I don't think an artwork is complete until there's a viewer, and I'm not saying that in the sense of there's to be a lot of viewers. I make work that's experimental so I don't have a huge scope of viewers but I feel like that that's a translation in and of itself too. I make the work and then that work then gets translated again by the viewer.
D: It’s funny because I never thought I'd be quoting Alejandro Iñárritu in this, but every year I like to watch those Hollywood Reporter director roundtables they do on YouTube, and there was one that, and I always remember this, where the moderator poised the question of continuing to make movies even if deserted on an island, and his (Iñárritu’s) answer was along the lines of, “if I was on an island, I wouldn't even bother because, what's the point of that?”
The point being that there should be an audience there, and if you're just making something, whether it be a movie or a sculpture or whatever, and it's just for you, it’s as if it doesn't even exist at that point.
P: Yeah, and that's the part that I resonate with the most, but I also respect that there's lots of artists that really do find pure joy in just act of creation and the joy they have in that translation. I feel like the fascinating part about art is that last step of viewer interpretation. I would agree with "island man."
D: And obviously I think it would not be great to classify or categorize, but I do think that there are some mediums that lend themselves more to being community based, which is where I think you're coming from. But then there are those who are on their own island more - there's a spectrum there for sure.
P: 100%.
D: When you were talking about the joy of going into your art and then using it as an opportunity to explore and find something that you didn't think would be there originally, this actually hits quite closely to something my prior interview, the filmmaker C.W. Winter, really fixated on. Which relates to going in with those root ideas, but then not wanting to make solid art.
P: I respect that lots of artists work in different ways. My partner is a filmmaker as well.
It depends on what project they're working on, but they've done lots of projects where they pre shoot the whole film. They go and pre-shoot shot for shot without the actors so that they know all the angles they want, and it's just a different way of working.
I did a bit of work in the camera department during film school and right after. And in that way, you're working on the exact shot list you’re getting. There's a lot of skill, talent and beauty that can come out of that, but there is so much pleasure in working these alternative models and on a smaller scale. It aligns more with visual art making. If you’re creating a painting, you're not gonna have a regimented perfect plan of how you're going to do it.
You might have your process and everything, but ultimately, you have to be adaptive to what the paint looks like on the canvas. For me, and it sounds lazy, but it truly isn't, I don't work well when I'm stuck in that pre production mode.
If I had to try and figure out all my ideas with a paper and a pen, I would never get anything done. I work best when I'm in the moment. Frankly, most of my work comes from this place of doing a lot of research and thinking and reading and then I allow my brain to wander if that makes sense.
I take too long of showers. I go for too long of walks. I try and give my head blank time. One of my favorite ways to come up with ideas is go watch slow cinema. I often get my best ideas during that. And it's because I get an image stuck in my head. I'll get one image and I'll have to go and figure out how to make that one image and then the rest of it often comes. I'm just more in tune with my body in the moment, as opposed to, too much, um, thinking.
D: What you're saying is something that also resonates a lot with me and in essence it's really just allowing yourself to swim in a liminal space, right?
P: Yeah, I like the word swim in particular and it allows for improvisation as well. I think ultimately that's always going to be it, right? It's like there's always going to be theory and then impulse and then it's always going to be like that. You might have an impulse that just comes out of nowhere and you end up chasing that instead. And sometimes you don't know why you're chasing it. And then a year later, you're like, “oh!”
It’s cool that art is one of the spaces that we're kind of given permission for that too, you know. We have to justify and even in art, there's all these systems in place to make you kind of justify. Okay, why are you doing that?
I just started a Master's Degree and I'm TA’ing for this great professor. He’s a painter and he was talking about how art school nowadays is very much driven by conceptual art, which makes sense because that's what's very popular and I found that in film school as well.
We learned a lot about concepts, ideas, theory, and that's amazing, but the professor I'm working with, Doug, he's coming from a place of very materially based teaching and he's like, you could spend a whole semester on just one fricking question, like, how do I mix these two colors together? You know what I mean? Why isn't that a justification to a curious inquiry, you know?
D: These three works curiously deviate from contemporary trends in avant-garde cinema for their makeup being strongly guided by performance art/installation practices. Whereas many experimental filmmakers today have seemingly fixated on the diaristic or structural, how do you feel that making sculptures and other gallery art has informed your work back in film?
P: Part of it is I like all types of art. I think great artists steal. Like, I love to steal other people's concepts and translate them into my own ideas. I don't mean to literally steal, obviously.
That's why I like watching slow cinema because I'll watch a film and then come up with an idea for a photo that has nothing to do with the slow cinema but you know something about the way it's approached. I'm not super interested in what's popular if that makes sense just because like that's always going to be a changing thing so I just have to work within what makes sense to my brain and my way of seeing the world so for me I was always interested in context like I was explaining earlier, so it just always made sense to ask what is beyond the frame of the cinema even?
My work has been screened both in cinemas but also in art galleries. Tethered Connections is the clearest example because it's a purely installation based work where it's a 30 second looping piece that's meant to look almost like video cam footage and then it's played and displayed on a computer itself. Then it's installed in a gallery space. It's meant to, in some way, make you explicitly aware of what's beyond the frame because the frame itself is part of the work, you know?
Lens based making in general is kind of what I'm calling it, but I'm frankly open to anything because I love the cinema so much. And like, I still have so much work that plays in cinemas and I still appreciate cinema so much, so why do I say all this?
Because I'm just so interested in what's outside the frame and making the viewer aware of that. I never even thought of my work as performance art until this last year, because when I applied to art schools, some of the professors were like “ah, so I see you're interested in performance art” and I was like, I am? Oh, I didn't know that. I've deeply admired performance art for a very long time.
I try to keep a broad touchstone of everywhere, but I've always admired performance art because it's so visceral and it's so much about the body. There's so many amazing women within performance art as well. I think it’s an under-appreciated field in some ways, partly because it's ethereal.
Is that the right word? Because it disappears. So that's why I never thought of myself purely as a performance artist, because lots of performance artists documented. What is the final-ness of this work going to be?
D: So when you’re viewing these mediums that are displayed in frames, whether it be a movie or a photograph that's hung up on a wall or a painting, can you talk about this and the importance of where you experience them? Maybe it might be in a gallery or a movie theater or at home.
P: I'm hyper aware of the spaces that my work shows in. I try and think about how I can show the work in a way that makes sense in the space it's showing. There's two ways my work ends up being seen.
In film festivals, projected in a cinema of sorts, or in these art gallery contexts. I'm happy that my work has shown in traditional art gallery spaces, but it's also shown in some more experimental art spaces, so there's been quite a variety of space. When you work in an art gallery context, you have a lot more say in how your work is shown, because in a film festival context, It's just presumed that your film's going to project, it's going to screen. You give them a DCP, and there you go. When you're showing in that kind of context, I try and be more aware of making those kinds of questions more explicit within the work.
I don’t know if you've heard of this term, it comes from theater. It's called the Proscenium Arch. I had a film professor introduce me to it. It's this great concept. It comes from 20th century theater. The proscenium arch is this structural element that actually frames a stage.In theater, it’s making the audience directly aware that they are watching a performance. So I try and use little cues like that.
Almost all of my films involve a human looking directly into the camera and making the viewer aware I'm watching them back. For The Big Reveal, one of the last times I showed that, I had a show at Cineworks. That work was made on 16mm and then hand painted. We installed it where the projector was just on the ground and it was designed to loop. And then the film strip itself. It's only a little over two minutes long. The loop itself is maybe 50 or 60 feet long. So we just made a giant loop that filled the ceiling and hung from a shower curtain and wrapped back around. So, how can the viewer not be consistently and obviously aware of a giant projector and a giant film loop.
I like showing my hand. I both want to make magic for the viewer, and make them be like, “how did she do that?” but also show something about it that feels like, “well, this is how she did it.” If you look long enough, you can figure it out. You know what I mean? I don't want to pretend that I'm not constantly stealing, and I mean that in not a real stealing way. You use that little weird trick. Okay. I'm going to use that weird little trick. And I want to tell everyone else about that weird little trick so we can all do it.
D: To be self-reflexive?
P: That's exactly what it is.
D: Moving beyond this film, I’m equally fascinated by your installation work as well. Particularly Who is this city for? (2021) & Hometown, or Fragment of Northeast Sector (2021). Both interactive pieces that seek to activate the political imagination of their audience through a clever linking of structural realities with an earnest playfulness deeply specific to you. I’d love to know how these projects originated and anecdotes, if any, of their effect.
P: Who is this city for? was a zine project I did, coming from this place of fascination, again, with context, specifically with place. And even more specifically with maps and cartography, something I'm going to be exploring more in the future, hopefully.
I was interested in this field of psychogeography, which simply put, is the exploration of how psychology and geography interact. And there was this great method that was developed where you explore a space by having no destination in mind and you are just meant to walk. It's usually encouraged that you do it in a small group if possible and you explore a neighborhood. Or an area and you try to really be in tune with your feelings and your physiological and psychological responses.
You know, when we have a stroll, we go for a walk to get to this place or we're going to work or we're going to school or we're going to see a friend. You know all these places. The space is used as a transit space. This method makes you more aware of things that seem objective and neutral like sidewalks and street lights and trees in your neighborhood and the houses and the buildings and those aren't neutral decisions. They affect us. For me, this one was about my particular neighborhood and my fascination with the trees in my neighborhood and how I felt that they really defined the the space. It was connecting that. It relates to that context thing again and same with Hometown, or Fragment of Northeast Sector. That was the beginning of this interest in maps, and I don't love the execution of that work.
Frankly, I was working with new material I hadn't fully figured out yet, but it was kind of this work that transitioned my fascination with the context that the TV provides and the context that a map provides in this context of media versus the context of something like cartography or placemaking.
And so that work (Hometown) is I'm deconstructing an old CRT TV and it's playing with this imaginative ability of map making as a future making tool. I think you said playful.. That is what I'm trying to be. I was exploring what I would say were environmental issues, because that work I was trying to use a map of sensitive ecosystems from where I grew up in Coquitlam and those areas that are being taken away. And then in Who is this city for?, I was dealing with housing affordability and urban development. How I thought the trees were an allegory for that. So they're both serious topics, but I like to add this sort of playfulness. To give ourselves permission to think about it like this, that's the playfulness if that makes sense.
Who is this city for? (2021)
D: It’s interactive! The audience can play along with the work.
P: That's the hardest part of filmmaking. Maybe that's why I'm always trying to make the viewer aware of the film because I desire to make the film somehow interactive and maybe that's why I've been making more works that aren't just films because it's like, haha, now they can touch it!
Hometown, or Fragment of Northeast Sector (2021)
D: Have you seen that movie by Alex Koberidze, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021)
P: No, but I like that title!
D: Particularly with these projects here, if we can link it back to the cinema, I think there's something of a through line. There's a segment in there that I fondly remember. It's still memorable to me as kind of like an all time movie moment. When the female protagonist in the film quite literally switches actresses in the beginning of the movie. You see the first actress fall asleep. I think she falls into a coma or something, and you see a close-up of her face. Then the movie tells you through narration, to close your eyes and to place your hands over your face. Then upon hearing a sound cue, to open your eyes. And upon completion of this process the actress is suddenly replaced on screen.
P: I love that! I love art that teaches you the rules of how to view the art. And I love it telling you to do that, but knowing people, some people in the audience were like “No! I'm not doing that. I want to see what's on the screen!”
I want to watch the movie just for that moment. It sounds great.
D: With this blog being a forum for cinephilia, and really of all arts, it’s mandatory for me to ask about your own experience with films, albums, & other artistic projects - new and old - that mean something to you. What are some works you consider your all-time faves and what have you enjoyed recently?
P: I really try to have a broad sense of taste. I think it's good to exercise that.
I really love Tsai Ming-liang's films. That's who I was thinking of when I was talking about slow cinema earlier. He was one of the first slow cinema filmmakers I discovered. I haven't seen all of his films, but the works I've seen, I really resonate with.
I really like animation. I've never made an animated film, but I believe there's something unique and special within that. I love experimental animation as well. There's so much great Canadian animation out there too. I really love this film called Boy and the World (2013). It's a Brazilian film. I think there's something special about non North American animation, especially animation that is friendly for children because animation within a North American context, it's only aimed at children, frankly, or it's explicitly adult content.
I also really do have a sweet spot for the Ghibli apparatus. One of my favorite films is My Neighbor Totoro (1988). It gives credit to a child's way of seeing the world and the child's brain to understand in a different way. That's no less valuable than an adult's perspective. And I think that there's something really powerful about that. And I love to try and take that energy into my work, too. Maybe that's partly like the playfulness. I'm not creating work for children at all, but I think that there's something about giving yourself permission to have a childlike wonder of the world that is really powerful as an artist.
I played a video game that was called Pathologic. I played the second one. It's a Russian video game and I really like it because it's very much about the medium itself. I think that's why it fascinated me. It’s very self reflexive but also very depressing though. I don't know why I like it. I usually don't like such sad art, but yeah, I don't know..
I really, really love Leviathan (2012), and all the works (by Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel). It literally made me seasick. Like, I felt sick watching it. And I just can't not give a film credit for that. Do you know what I mean?
D: Where did you watch that?
I watched that film at The Cinematheque in Vancouver. I arrived right before the film was starting and I got a horrible seat right in the front, but maybe that was the best thing. Cause I was like, “oh my god, everything is this boat!”
I haven't seen it yet, but De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), it's a shame I haven't seen it yet because it seems so in line with Black Box Investigations. Even just hearing about that concept, I must admit, inspired me because it was just so fascinating.
I also love the one that's- what's the one with the sheep? The herding one?
D: Sweetgrass (2009), right?
P: Yes, yes. They lend such a unique POV. I wish that was the one I preferred more because they're both tragic, but that one has a light earnestness to it.
I don't always come back to cinema, I make art in so many spheres, but it's hard to not come back to it. The attention people give to cinema, especially when it's seen in a theater. I didn't appreciate it enough when I was only making films and it's so fun to go see your work in a theater with an audience and be like, “oh my god, they're all watching it.”
Like, they're paying attention. A lot of my favorite artists still end up being filmmakers for that reason. Cause they really stick in your brain.
Yeah… but it's like-oh! I love Stan Brakhage. He's amazing. I love the photographer Stan Douglas. He's amazing. There's a lot of people. I should name more women…
.png)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.png)
.jpeg)
.png)
.png)
