FOYER ︎ NICK SMITH ︎FOYER︎NICK SMITH ︎
Foyer is an ongoing research project by British artist Nick Smith. His artistic enquiry centres on the role of the foyer within the city, exploring how this architecture upholds structures of class, labour, and urban hospitality.
Drawing from his own professional experience as a property inspector, Foyer reflects on the ephemeral, often invisible relationships between those who provide services and those who receive them. Utilising the project as a way to document, understand, and archive these interactions.
Part documentary, part speculative fiction, the project gathers and reconfigures the voices, scripts, and social performances embedded in the city’s service economy — from concierges and delivery drivers to landlords, estate agents, and sex workers. These fragments become a lens through which to examine the city's widening economic, social and cultural divide, and its daily rituals. And the architecture, buildings and development choices that upholds them.
The first iteration of Foyer will take the form of a published reader developed in collaboration with Naomi Crede interweaving text, image, and field research. This publication will serve as both foundation and proposition — a container for imagining and realising potential future iterations of Foyer. A wider public programme of talks, workshops and events will accompany the project.
Drawing from his own professional experience as a property inspector, Foyer reflects on the ephemeral, often invisible relationships between those who provide services and those who receive them. Utilising the project as a way to document, understand, and archive these interactions.
Part documentary, part speculative fiction, the project gathers and reconfigures the voices, scripts, and social performances embedded in the city’s service economy — from concierges and delivery drivers to landlords, estate agents, and sex workers. These fragments become a lens through which to examine the city's widening economic, social and cultural divide, and its daily rituals. And the architecture, buildings and development choices that upholds them.
The first iteration of Foyer will take the form of a published reader developed in collaboration with Naomi Crede interweaving text, image, and field research. This publication will serve as both foundation and proposition — a container for imagining and realising potential future iterations of Foyer. A wider public programme of talks, workshops and events will accompany the project.
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Nick Smith (b. 1982, Liverpool) is an artist who explores the theme of class within the context of the built environment through video collages and photographic installations. His archive of photographs, videos, and research materials, compiled from his work as both an artist and property inspector, serves as his primary source material. Smith aims to create images that evoke a sense of connection between the past and present, focusing on moments of arrival and departure in public space, regional identity, memory, and recent history.
Smith has had solo exhibitions at OUTPUT Gallery, Liverpool; The Birley, Preston; OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich; Concord Space, L.A; and Photofusion, London. His work has been included in group shows and screenings at Two Queens, Leicester; Bloomberg New Contemporaries: Cornerhouse, Manchester and Rochelle School, London; Karst, Plymouth; Folkestone Triennial and Auto Italia, London. In 2023 Nick was selected as an awardee of the second edition of the LOEWE FOUNDATION / Studio Voltaire Award.
Images courtesy of the artist
Smith has had solo exhibitions at OUTPUT Gallery, Liverpool; The Birley, Preston; OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich; Concord Space, L.A; and Photofusion, London. His work has been included in group shows and screenings at Two Queens, Leicester; Bloomberg New Contemporaries: Cornerhouse, Manchester and Rochelle School, London; Karst, Plymouth; Folkestone Triennial and Auto Italia, London. In 2023 Nick was selected as an awardee of the second edition of the LOEWE FOUNDATION / Studio Voltaire Award.
Images courtesy of the artist