The Afro-future is now

Cauleen Smith's video exhibition, REMOTE VIEWING, curated by Rashida Bumbray, continues through this Saturday at The Kitchen. While I have yet to see that show, I did go to last evening's special presentation of Smith's Carousel Microcinema: GLOSSALALIA 5.0.

Naming something Carousel Microcinema...well, the inherent musicality of it, the visual intimations of it, the irresistible charm of it, all of that works for me right away. Here Smith compiles numerous short videos and clips harvested online, or acquired in other ways, to create a dreamlike, even hypnotic, serial collage. One technique Smith enjoys involves “using Google as an oracle,” as she calls it--posing a question to the Sacred Search Engine, often divining obscure gems.

Including seventeen artfully arranged works, Carousel Microcinema: GLOSSALALIA 5.0 demonstrates the range of Smith’s curiousity, sensibilities and sensitivity. Dutch photojournalist Jan-Joseph Stok’s disturbing footage from a rebel soldier camp in Darfur (2009) abuts samples of Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic fieldwork films from Florida (1928-29), contrasting his professional voyeurism with her engaging intimacy and empathy. Director Wendy Morgan’s wondrous music video for Gnarls Barkley’s “Going On” (2009)--now, for me, “on serious repeat,” as Smith would say--echoes the juicy, life-affirming hip hop dance of Yak Films’ Turf Feinz: Dancing in The Rain. Head-spinning psychedelic visions abound in Jabari Hall-Smith’s sci-fi mythic Lil’ Big Hed (2006) and Ulysses Jenkins’ Planet X (2006), but from an audaciously Black perspective with lacerating social critique. And there’s much, much more.

It’s an amazing visual mixtape and magical mystery tour around Smith’s bustling mind. Back in 2008, blogger audioblog wrote about Smith, “Seriously, if I had to be stuck on a film set for the rest of my life, I would want to be on her set--I'd always be seeing, hearing, and learning something new. If someone told me she'd made a film about paint drying, I'd be first in line to get a seat.”

Here's some information on Smith's REMOTE VIEWING installation:

California-based filmmaker, screenwriter, and video installation artist, Cauleen Smith is best known for Afro-futurist cinematic works that weave intimate narratives of love, yearning, and the dream-world with known histories, imagined landscapes, and cultural symbolism to activate collective memory. For her first New York solo exhibition, Smith presents three new distinct but interrelated video works that draw from abstracted historical narratives of absence, loss, displacement, burial, and excavation—not only exposing that which has disappeared, but also investigating the gestures and traumas associated with the violence of erasure. Smith’s new works triangulate these re-enactments with iconic site-specific land art practices of the seventies to reveal nuances of contemporary shifts in the displacement of people and of the natural landscape.

Exhibition hours for REMOTE VIEWING are Tuesday through Friday, noon to 6pm; Saturday 11-6pm. Admission is free. For more information, click here.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)