Cauleen Smith

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Mythical forms embodied in puppetry and cinematic spectacle.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Night Sky is the story of two friends' journey through the desert into a synesthetic realm of the senses. After their car breaks down, Cleo and Jay discover a small portal that leads to another dimension where a dance marathon never ends, time collapses, and exhaustion is rampant. The girls travel to a sound chamber deep in the desert where they encounter a speaking dog that offers them a vision of their place in the universe.. Meanwhile, the exhausted marathon contestants continue shuffling their feet with no end in sight.

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.

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.

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

When I fly into the canyon I dip below sea level. When I fall into the water my eardrums burst. There is no sound in space. If it weren't for you I'd be lost.

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

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

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.

Explores the careers of twenty black women working as film directors.

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

Three women in Hollywood talk to the camera one summer (with a coda six months later). Sara is a casting director; her soliloquies are addressed to Samson (her blind infant son) and to Holly Hunter. She talks about her husband's refusal to touch their son and her discovery of his affair. Gina is a masseuse - blithe, solipsistic, scheming to steal the energy of Hollywood players. She frequently refers to her dead sister Wanda, kidnaped by their father. Phyllis, sexually abused by her father when a teen, addresses her son Eric. She's a producer, working on remaking Pasolini's "Teorema." As the project falls apart, so does she. All three hum or sing, "You made me love you."

A young woman in a photography class begins taking pictures of black men out of fear they will soon be extinct. Restored by the Criterion Collection, Janus Films, and the Academy Film Archive. Supervised by Cauleen Smith.

A young woman in a photography class begins taking pictures of black men out of fear they will soon be extinct. Restored by the Criterion Collection, Janus Films, and the Academy Film Archive. Supervised by Cauleen Smith.

A young woman in a photography class begins taking pictures of black men out of fear they will soon be extinct. Restored by the Criterion Collection, Janus Films, and the Academy Film Archive. Supervised by Cauleen Smith.

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.”

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.

A time-lapse documentation of Lee filter film gels installed into the windows of the Dusable Museum of African American History's Roundhouse designed by Burnham and Root in 1888.