Martin Smith 'Feel good hit of the Summer'

“Feel good hit of the summer" is a song by American rock band Queens of the Stone Age that repeats the name of the drugs; nicotine, valium, vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol for 2 minutes and 41 seconds and a photo\text exhibition that interweaves photography, narrative and writing.

The ways texts, images and objects can simultaneously hold two confirming, competing and conflicting meanings depending on context and vantage is a recurrent theme of the exhibition. The narrative worlds created in the exhibition through the combination of text and image weave seemingly disparate images, people and events. The appropriation of Fatima, Radiohead, Roland Barthes and mathematics intersect with vernacular photography to highlight the complexity of meaning making in an age where we have access to unimaginable information.

Martin Smith is a photo-text artist based in Meanjin/Brisbane. He received his Doctorate from Griffith University in 2018 and is currently a lecturer in photography at the Queensland College of Art. His work is held in a number of public collections including QAGOMA, MONA, Art Gallery of Western Australia, University of Western Australia and Edith Cowan University. With over a decade of exhibitions to his credit from Brisbane to New York and Hong Kong, Smith may be drawing on his immediate world but his visual language speaks to universal experience.