Your browser does not support the audio player
Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants. Sondra Perry explores the intersection of black identity, digital culture and power structures through video, media, installation and performance. Perry makes work about blackness, black femininity and African American heritage, often taking her personal history as a point of departure. Her use of digital tools and material, ranging from blue screen technology and 3D avatars to found footage from the internet, reflects on these modes of representation and the abstraction of black identity in art and media.
--
Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of activism in service of ecstatic social space and contemplation. Smith enjoys container gardening, likes cats and collects disco balls, vinyl records, and books. She is an avid leisure and functional cyclist.
She lives in Los Angeles and is Art Program faculty at California Institute of the Arts. BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and MFA, University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater Film and Television. Smith is the recipient of the following awards: Rockefeller Media Arts Award, Creative Capital Film /Video, Independent Spirit Someone to Watch Award, Chicago 3Arts Grant, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chicago Expo Artadia Award, and Rauschenberg Residency, Herb Alpert Awards in the Arts in Film and Video 2016, United States Artists Award 2017, and was the 2016 inaugural recipient of the Ellsworth Kelly Award.
Sondra Perry makes videos and performances that foreground the tools of digital production as a way to critically reflect on new technologies of representation and to remobilize their potential.