Cauleen Smith

The obligatory pilgrimage to Goreé Island is almost like visitng an oracle. Everyone hears something different, and what was heard is nearly possible to articlate to another. But it must be heeded. The weaver makes tapestries of our stories. And the tapestry spans the Atlantic, as does modernity.

Presented as a trilogy for the first time, Cauleen Smith’s The Volcano Manifesto brings together three recent films—My Caldera (2022), Mines to Caves (2023), and The Deep West Assembly (2024)—in a densely woven meditation on geological and cinematic time, on the wild abyss of volcanoes and the womb of mines and caves.” — MoMA Doc Fortnight

Short film commissioned by the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, Norway

The imagery of the film is of volcanic scenes in various life stages, from pouring magma to inert mountain, with colors unnaturally saturated – purple, blue, and orange. The scratchy, chaotic aesthetic is created through Smith’s proprietary process of placing TikTok video stills onto 35 mm film, then rendering it in 4K as an artifact of the original footage. A driving, heavy metal soundtrack provides an apt audio accompaniment to the visual onslaught of nature’s rage.

Back in 2018 I invited an intergenerational group of women to help me make some moving-images in Noah Purifoy’s Desert Museum in Joshua Tree. The resulting film, 'Sojourner,' contemplates centuries of black feminist mysticism and cultural production. Something about Jeff’s 'Suffolk' reminded me of waking up at four in the morning so that we could catch that sun rise, then napping until 4 pm so that we could ready for sunset. Our film depended on being sensitive to and present for the orbit of our planet, the loop around the sun.

A global portrait documenting the year's events, Cinetracts '20 features the work of an international lineup of 20 filmmakers. Capturing the zeitgeist in their own backyard, the artists' short films are the culmination of a year-long residency project.

The word bone translates to yoruba as “bones.” In Egungun: Ancestor Can’t Find Me, a shell-covered sea creature swims emerges form the Gulf of Mexico and wanders island jungles and shores. The shelled creature we see wandering in this film bears traits of both male (egungun) and female (gelede) ancestors. The chasm of time, distance and violence has severed its link to the living leaving it to look and listen for traces of our lives in an endless disorienting loop. The film references the ancestor-reverent Egungun masking tradition of the Yoruba people who, indigenous to modern-day Ghana, Benin, Togo, and Nigeria, were among the many African ethnic groups captured, enslaved and sold as chattel into the Transatlantic Slave trade.

Set in Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Desert Art Museum in Joshua Tree, California, artist Cauleen Smith reimagines this unique space as a radical feminist utopia. Among the scattered assemblages, a group of women whose dynamic, colourful outfits radiate with energy, gather to re-stage an iconic photograph of men taken by Billy May for Life Magazine in 1966. While paying homage to the feminist abolitionist Sojourner Truth, the title refers to the spiritual journey these women embark upon.

Personal pilgrimages to three sites of extreme creativity, invention, and generosity: Alice Coltrane's Ashram, Watts Towers, and Watervliet Shaker Community

Three monologues adapted from the groundbreaking book, Black Women in White America, edited by Gerda Lerner.

Sine at the Canyon Sine at the Sea began as a video designed to be background eye-candy at an outdoor performance event and evolved into a protest against the reverberations of the neo-fascist nonsense percolating in American culture.

Mythical forms embodied in puppetry and cinematic spectacle.

Choreographer Taisha Paggett activates a vacant lot in the Washington Park Neighborhood on the southside of Chicago and enjoys an encounter with young resident Maylk Singleton.

Smith interweaves the figure of the crow through the histories of Syracuse and Auburn, New York, both of which were key stations on the Underground Railroad and innovators in early cinematic and 3D optical technologies. Crow Requiem connects this history to recent and ongoing violence against people of color at the hands of the state.

H-E-L-L-O translates the famous musical sequence from Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind into a greeting for sites around New Orleans loaded with the histories of music and procession.

A found footage assemblage of epic proportions. Produced on residency at Chicago Film Archives, with music by The Eternals.

A collection of 14 short films that all revolve around Sun Ra and his time in Chicago

"Remote Viewing" is a story in which a man related that, as a boy, he had watched the whites in his town attempt to obliterate every trace of the black community’s history by digging a deep hole in which to bury a historical schoolhouse.

Second of three films relating to American conceptual Land Art of the 1970's and American histories and traumas.

Sun Ra’s anthem Space Is the Place performed by The Rich South High School Marching Band in Chinatown Square, Chicago. Cauleen Smith organised and filmed this energetic flash-mob performance, showing the unsuspecting passers-by who gather to listen. The young men and women let nothing, not even rain, bring the performance to a halt.

Science Fiction rumination of post-Katrina New Orleans: space, place and post traumatic stress. Executive produced by Paul Chan and Creativetime.

Entitled, a correspondence with historical still life painters. Super-8 transferred to digital video “Smith has developed a lyrical visual practice, weaving in and out of the independent film world and occasionally gracing the art world with breathtaking film installations that upend traditional forms of narrative filmmaking.” BOMB

Images and poems responding to the photographs of Malik Sidié. A collaboration with poet, A. Van Jordan. Loops designed for install.

The syntax of cinema collides with string theory and the unchanging sameness of movies, romance, horror, and landscape.

An Alien is sent to earth to investigate the "incubators." She discovers that she is replacing a rogue agent. She questions her mission.

A young woman in a photography class begins taking pictures of black men out of fear they will soon be extinct.

A lyrical visual poem on movement, time, and wandering.

“Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) is less a depiction of 'reality' than an exploration of the implications of the mediation of Black history by film, television, magazines, and newspapers. Using her alter ego, Kelly Gabron, Smith fabricates a personal history of her emergence as an artist from white-male-dominated American history (and American film history). Smith collages images and bits of text from a scrapbook by 'Kelly Gabron' that had been completed before the film was begun, and provides female narration by 'Kelly Gabron' that, slowly but surely, makes itself felt over the male narration about Kelly Gabron (Chris Brown is the male voice). The film's barrage of image, text and voice is repeated twice, and is followed by a coda. That most viewers see the second presentation of the imagery differently from the original presentation demonstrates one problem with trusting any media representation.” Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.

Daily Rains is a measured, poetic work that confronts head-on the micro- and macro-aggressions faced by young Black women. Restored by the Academy Film Archive.