Cauleen Smith: H-E-L-L-O

Collective’s 2022 programme opens with Los Angeles–based artist Cauleen Smith’s film H-E-L-L-O. We are delighted to present Smith’s first solo exhibition in Scotland.

Smith’s work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. For over three decades she has employed radical thinking to envision a better world through film, video, sculpture, textiles, installations and drawings. Bringing together themes of historic erasure, presence and loss, Smith believes in the redemptive and transformative power of art, music and text. Drawing from the language of Third World Cinema, science fiction and Structuralist film, Smith explores themes relating to the African diaspora, environment and the human condition.

H-E-L-L-O, made in 2014, signals a search for connection in a time of uncertainty and unrest. The film translates the famous five-note musical motif from Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind into a greeting for sites around post-hurricane-Katrina New Orleans loaded with the histories of music and procession. At each site, musicians from the city play the sequence on a series of instruments, from trumpet, to cello and bass saxophone. Their interpretations of the sequence, originally written by film composer John Williams as a coded extra-terrestrial hello, speak mournfully of New Orleans’ enduring spirit despite a troubled recent past and uncertain future.

Presented in Collective’s City Dome space, H-E-L-L-O sits alongside the rich history of the site as a place of astrological study and observation, monument, time and communication, themes at the heart of Smith’s work. Although situated in the geography of New Orleans, the film allows us to contemplate Edinburgh’s relationship to its own landscape, inhabitants and history in a time of turbulence and change. The architecture of the site brings together Smith’s deep-rooted interest in science fiction, Afrofuturism and public space. When the need for connection is increasingly imperative, Smith’s faith in the importance of culture and trust in transformation is not only essential, it’s how we might begin to heal.

Cauleen Smith received a BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University, and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Theater Film and Television. Her films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions at the Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California; the New Museum, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois. She has had solo shows for her films and installations at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2020); The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2020); The Frye Museum, Seattle, Washington (2019); Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, Richmond, Virginia (2019) Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2018); Art Institute of Chicago (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2012); and The Kitchen, New York (2011), among others. She currently teaches in the School of Art at CalArts in Santa Clarita, California.