BIOGRAPHY

​Cauleen Smith is an artist who makes films, installations, and objects. She actively invites engagement, and with much of the work she employs a purposeful undermining of image and language to elicit contemplation.

Smith’s films create worlds that expand on the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental filmmaking. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, she assembles poetic compositions that gently reveal nuanced narratives, both familiar, and oftentimes, purposefully opaque.

Her text-based tapestries follow a historic tradition of heraldry. These banners, which can be understood as a social device symbolizing community organizing, declare personalized idioms sewn in script that simulates her own handwriting, lifted directly from her sketchbook.

Through her installations, Smith constructs archetypes of the universe and she assembles miniature worlds using myriad items, which often include mundane object and figurines alongside symbols of colonialism, such as porcelain objects and potted plants, paired with disco balls, rocks and minerals, resulting in something otherworldly and also museological.

​For Smith, consideration of the audience is an important element of her process, and she uses a full range of media and references to express her belief in utopian potentiality.

FRAMES OF REFERENCE, FALL 2025
CAULEEN SMITH
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PROGRAM ONE: Wednesday, September 3rd - 6pm
Jepson Hall 118, Jepson School, University of Richmond

Songs for Earth and Folk (2013)
“Flowers, outer space, “Africa,” birds, and bicycles. Commissioned by the Chicago Film archive, and scored by the Chicago-based band "The Eternals," Songs for Earth and Folk scores a dizzying amalgamation of archival footage—from Castle Films newsreels to speculative imagery of outer space—exploring the human impulse to waste, exploit, and destroy in almost every context.” - Film at Lincoln Center

Sine at the Canyon Sine at the Sea (2016)
“Remixing original 16mm footage and appropriated film and audio clips, Sine at the Canyon, Sine at the Sea is a vertiginous montage of disruption and protest of history repeating itself. The patterns, examined and fluctuated by the sine wave, points to the disorienting real-world manifestations of relentless imperialism.” - Film at Lincoln Center

Triangle Trade (2017)
Through marionette avatars with bodies engineered by Jerome Havre with heads made by their artists, Cauleen Smith and Camille Turner in their own likenesses, the artists attempt to reckon with the convergence of their identities as postcolonial diasporic subjects by exploring their relationship to land and black ontologies.

My Caldera (2022)
“[In My Caldera], 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. A common thread in Smith’s work, this exhibition looks to nature for an alternative – to draw an analogy to human dynamics.” – Morán Morán

Mines or Caves (2023)
“In Mines to Caves, Smith foregrounds how traditional capitalist structures like overconsumption and land development affect our relationships to each other and the environment, and draws from work Smith developed during her residence with the Aspen Art Museum and Anderson Ranch in Spring 2022. The film, shot partially on location inside the mine, puts forth the artist’s research around geologic extraction in the United States” - Aspen Art Museum

All the Money (2024)
“All The Money is a scorching analysis of finance, and how British might was most often procured at the expense of Black flesh. A deeply powerful piece of music co-produced by Vijay Ayer, it also features Alya Al Sultani. The song further explores darker aspects of our history through its video, a revealing watch directed by filmmaker and multimedia artist Cauleen Smith.” - Clash Music

The Deep West Assembly (2024)
“The Deep West Assembly delves into the concepts of geological time and Blackness as camouflaged in image, song, and word by Black and Brown creators (after thinkers such as Suzanne Césaire and Ryan C. Clarke). Incorporating images of geological formations like lava caves, calderas, and salt domes, as well as human-made landforms such as ancient Choctaw burial mounds, The Deep West Assembly paints a view of the American South as a horizontal “Deep West” (a term borrowed from poet Wanda Coleman). Smith situates this cultural Deep West in the Mississippi River Delta, exploring Black cultural practices as kin to Indigenous traditions. Actor Dionne Audain embodies multiple voices—guides—reading, among other texts, Smith’s recent Volcano Manifesto (F Books, 2022) for the camera.” – Astrup Fearnley Museet

PROGRAM TWO: Thursday, September 4th - 6pm
Jepson Hall 118, Jepson School, University of Richmond

Remote Viewing (2009)
“Connecting sites and incidents to create a concrete and recuperative Land art, Cauleen Smith’s Remote Viewing, made in 2009 on digital video, is a reenactment of a deeply impactful event as remembered by a man looking back on his childhood.” - The Criterion Collection

Elsewhere (2009)
Sited within a lush seemingly tropical haven, this is a study of the tension between the cinematic gaze, black interiority, and refusal.

Demon Fuzz (2010)
This film is desire as meditation, rather than a meditation on desire. "Demon Fuzz" was a British soul band from the seventies. Their albums were intoxicating and charming to Smith. The film is made from the outtakes for the Elsewhere installation which was included in Annette DiMeo Carlozzi’s show Desire at The Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas, in 2010.

Ergungun: Ancestor Can’t Find Me (2015)
An egungun is an embodied ancestral presence. The literal translation of egungun is “power concealed.” What happens when the ancestors lose their bearings, when the descendants they search for do not know their power?

In The Wake (2017)
Documentation of the In The Wake procession performed with The Whitney museum’s youth program, friends of the artists, and ringer vocalists, Justin Hicks, Storm Marrero, Martha Redbone, and Shelley Nicole.

Sojourner (2018)
“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.” - International Film Festival Rotterdam

Emanation, Don’t Break (2022)
Blue Note Records video commissioned by Immanuel Wilkins. Kites, jump rope, fishing lines. Try and Try again.

Homegirls (2024)
Named after the Home Girls literary anthology – the audio is Smith reading the bios of every contributor in the book.