NATASHA MATILA-SMITH 7 Minutes in Heaven 2021. Film still. Courtesy of the artist.
NATASHA MATILA-SMITH 7 Minutes in Heaven 2021. Film still. Courtesy of the artist.
NATASHA MATILA-SMITH 7 Minutes in Heaven 2021. Film still. Courtesy of the artist.
NATASHA MATILA-SMITH 7 Minutes in Heaven 2021. Film still. Courtesy of the artist.
NATASHA MATILA-SMITH 7 Minutes in Heaven 2021. Installation view, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2022.
7 Minutes in Heaven
Natasha Matila-Smith
7 June 2022 - 17 July 2022
A REAR WINDOW PROJECT
Natasha Matila-Smith is a multimedia artist whose artworks explore notions of romance, loneliness and the skewed or fictionalised nature of public performance through moving image, photography and text. 7 Minutes in Heaven (2021) is a moving portrait where the rift between public and private lives narrows, and in which a sense of romantic tension and disconnection gradually unfolds.
The idea of life, both online and offline, as being a kind of performance is played with in 7 Minutes in Heaven. While digital social networks and technologies disrupt and potentially erode spaces for genuine intimacy, Matila-Smith considers how to be an object of desire in any space.
Matila-Smith describes her works as being like an excerpt rather than a complete story, and although a feeling of ambiguity filters through 7 Minutes in Heaven, an apparent monologue emerges within the held gaze of subject and viewer.
Natasha Matila-Smith is an arts practitioner who lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau. She graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2014 from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. Her practice modus operandi is through confessional text-based works that explore her personal experiences of loneliness and discomfort in the world and, at the same time, how they relate to larger socio-political structures.