Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Dessert (Collapse) [Desert (Collapse)]

Image caption
BRIDGET SMITH

Dessert (Collapse) [Desert (Collapse)]

  • 2005
  • Chromogenic print on paper
  • 105 x 144,5 cm
  • Cat. F_148
  • Acquired in 2013
By:
Isabel Tejeda

This piece is part of Bridget Smith’s Cosmos project from 2005, which used videos and photographs to create an obvious contrast between the darkness of the night shown in the images and the daylight reflected in the clear desert sand. The artist’s intention is to generate images of real and simulated spaces where we can easily lose ourselves to escape from routine. The photo in question offers us the sandy landscape of the deserts and its solitude. It shows an undetermined place at a time when there is no life to be seen, but in spite of its apparent inhospitality, it provides an expansive territory for withdrawal, a refuge that is physically and mentally removed from monotonous everyday obligations.  In that play of opposites between reality and fiction, the fantastic nature of that place is based on the replacement of the intense desert light by a ghostly haze that does not allow the horizon to be seen as a defined line, but rather as a blurred border between places, realities and concepts.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Isabel Tejeda
Bridget Smith
Essex 1966

Bridget Smith graduated in Fine Arts in 1988 from Goldsmiths College at the University of London, where she also completed a Master’s Degree in Art in 1995.

She lives in London and works with photography and, since 2005, with video, documenting the existence of spaces that blur the borders between reality as it is presented and the imagination. Those spaces are chosen as an area of transition between the real and the simulated, between objectivity and subjectivity, they mostly offer evasion from monotonous everyday experiences and responsibilities, a captivating place to escape and find ‘something else, something different. Her lens captures interior and exterior spaces. Stand-out interior projects include Glamour Studio (Stable) (1999), in which she photographed interior, false sets, that had no permanent use and were not going to be inhabited; and Society (2007), a project involving a book of the same name with photos with no human presence taken inside different lesser-known clubs, associations and centres in London where cultural activities are run. Among her exterior projects, mention should be made of Mirage (1999), a series that shows the entertainment architecture and seductive spaces of Las Vegas; and Cosmos (2005), in which the starry skies and huge deserts hint at unfathomable places where we can lose ourselves.

Smith won the Rose Award for Photography of the Royal Academy of Arts (London) in 2009. During her extensive career, she has staged numerous solo shows at galleries in London, Auckland (New Zealand), Berlin, Tokyo, Prague, Oslo and Budapest.

Isabel Tejeda

 
«Cosmos» (London, 2005).
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.