Cauleen Smith, born Riverside, CA 1967 Search this
Medium:
digital video, color, sound; 07:41 minutes
Type:
Media Arts
Date:
2017
Exhibition Label:
Smith's art and filmmaking has always been driven by histories of Black brilliance that resonate across time. Listening closely to the spiritual and musical philosophies of composer, performer, and swamini Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda (1937--2007) has inspired Smith's recent works. Smith's cinematic collages connect Coltrane's transformative visions to others who create spaces for liberation from the nineteenth century to the present.
In Pilgrim, Coltrane's experimental jazz piano unfurls as Smith's camera moves solemnly through the white ashram buildings and hillside setting of the Hindu community Coltrane founded in California. These scenes soon merge with the gothic spirals of Watts Towers, mid-twentieth-century folk sculptures in southern Los Angeles, before fading into a Shaker cemetery in upstate New York, where a pre--Civil War religious group lived the values of racial and gender equality.
Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies, 2023
