MICHAEL SMITH VIDEOS AND MISCELLANEOUS STUFF FROM STORAGE (PT. 2)

About

For over thirty years Michael Smith has been using various identities in his work. One of his main personas, ‘Mike' has often been at the centre of his video, performance and installation work. Mike is just a regular guy, constrained by his own limited world-view, just getting on with his business, day to day, never quite keeping up with trends or technology — a symbol of twentieth century alienation. Narrated in Mike's own introspective voice, this ordinary man is a tragi-comic creation. Although ridiculous and often bland, his actions are sometimes familiar and universal, Mike an everyman, reflecting our own inadequacies. Michael Smith leaps between televisual presentation formats; puppet show, music video, infomercial, game and talk show, satirising and emphasising how mundane and homogenous the medium is. In his first solo exhibition in a UK institution, Smith with present a series of important works from the last three decades, across Tramway 1 and 5. Commissioned by Glasgow International and curated in association with Mark Beasley