'CROCODILE TEARS'

Crocodile Tears brings together a body of work created during the artists’ time at the Dutch Art Institute. The works, spanning video, photography and sculpture, continues Smith’s exploration of the boundaries between ‘performance’ and ‘authenticity’. Drawing on her research tracing the cameras search for ‘truth’, from cinéma-vérité to reality TV, she has come to focus on the performance of emotion, and specifically the tear. Throughout the show tears are shed from cutting onions, or having dry eyes, or are made from glass. Whilst none of these tears are ‘real’, Smith questions whether performative emotion can be harnessed to process somatically and achieve some form of catharsis.