Cauleen Smith

Sisters in Cinema

Yvonne Welbon

Stephanie Allain, Madeline Anderson

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

Drylongso

Cauleen Smith

Toby Smith, April Barnett

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

Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron)

Cauleen Smith

“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.”

Cinetracts '20

Želimir Žilnik, Sheilah ReStack

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.

Women in Film

Bruce Wagner

Beverly D'Angelo, Portia de Rossi

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."

Sojourner

Cauleen Smith

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.

I WANT TO SEE MY SKIRT

Cauleen Smith

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

Sine at the Canyon Sine at the Sea (by Kelly Gabron)

Cauleen Smith

Richard Spencer

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 Grid

Cauleen Smith

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

H-E-L-L-O

Cauleen Smith

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.

The Green Dress

Cauleen Smith

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

Crow Requiem

Cauleen Smith

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.

The Way Out Is The Way Two

Cauleen Smith

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

Pilgrim

Cauleen Smith

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

Songs for Earth & Folk

Cauleen Smith

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

Lessons in Semaphore

Cauleen Smith

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.