Frames of Reference Film Series: Cauleen Smith

Join the Department of Art & Art History for the Frames of Reference series, an annual program of artists' films and videos. The event is programmed and organized by Jeremy Drummond, associate professor in visual and media arts practice.

Frames of Reference showcases some of the most creative, challenging, thoughtful, and visionary artists working in film, video, and alternative media today. Programs feature artists and artworks that resist conventions and ideologies of mainstream media; explore creative, innovative approaches to narrative and experiments in time-based media; and embrace unique viewpoints, perspectives, or frames of reference. Learn more about the Frames of Reference series. Follow the series on Instagram at frames_of_reference_rva.

The program features film screenings followed by a Q&A with Cauleen Smith.

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

Co-sponsored by the Department of Art & Art History, School of Arts & Sciences, and University of Richmond Museums.

image credit: Cauleen Smith, My Caldera (2022)