Collective is pleased to present a new performance by Cauleen Smith commissioned as part of the current exhibition of her 2014 film H-E-L-L-O in our City Dome.
Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. She believes in the transformative power of art, music and text, and employs radical thought as a tool in her work to envision a better world.
H-E-L-L-O (2014) signals a search for connection in a time of uncertainty and unrest, bringing together themes of historic erasure, presence and loss. Performed in a series of significant cultural and public spaces in New Orleans during the regeneration of the city post Hurricane Katrina, H-E-L-L-O re-interprets the famous five-note musical motif from Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. With this five-note sequence, the artist signals a desire for connection across boundaries and borders, real and imagined.
Collective is delighted to host Cauleen Smith in Edinburgh to produce a public performance of the five-note sequence composed by John Williams. Working with Collective’s unique landscape, architecture and backdrop, the performance will take place across Calton Hill and will feature five locally based musicians playing the score as a call and response on their bass clef instruments.
The installation of Cauleen Smith’s film in Collective’s City Dome space brings the themes of H-E-L-L-O into conversation with her long-term interest in astronomy and coastal cities. H-E-L-L-O bears witness to the devastating impact and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and hones in on the damage that has been done to the long established African American community through the city’s eagerness to embrace regeneration.
The performance will create an opportunity for art and music to be rooted in these discussions and in Calton Hill as a site with a long history of cultural and political gatherings.
About Cleen Smith – Lives and works in Los Angeleaus, CA.
Her films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions including: the Whitney Biennial; Prospect 4, New Orleans; Studio Museum Harlem; the Contemporary Art Museum Houston; the New Museum, New York; and BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK. She has had solo exhibitions at: MASS MoCA; the Art Institute of Chicago; Institute for Contemporary Art Pennsylvania; the Museum of Contemporary, Chicago and upcoming at: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston and a two person exhibition with Theaster Gates at the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art.
Cauleen Smith is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including: the 2020 Wein Artist Prize from the Studio Museum in Harlem; the inaugural Ellsworth Kelly Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Art in 2016; the 2016 Herb Alpert Award for Film/Video; Rockefeller Media Arts Award; Creative Capital Film /Video; Chicago 3Arts Grant; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Artadia; a Rauschenberg Residency in 2015 and most recently in 2019 Cauleen Smith was an artist in residence at Artpace. The artist was born in Riverside, California and grew up in Sacramento. She earned a B.A in Cinema from San Francisco State University in 1991 and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1998. Cauleen Smith studied with Trinh T. Minh Ha, Angela Davis, and Lynn Hershman-Leeson at San Francisco State University. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. She lives in Los Angeles and is a Professor at CalArts School of Art.
Thursday 28 April 2022, 7pm, outdoors
Collective, City Observatory, Calton Hill, Edinburgh, EH7 5AA