Short profiles: Cauleen Smith and Charlotte Pryce

Charlotte Pryce: Film Alchemist

Charlotte Pryce’s films are reminiscent of alchemy, the magical process whereby base metals are transformed into gold or silver, as described in 1597’s The Mirror of Alchemy. Objects seem to come alive in Pryce’s enchanting work that evoke the atmosphere of centuries-old studies into the origins of matter. They help you experience what it must have been like to make a fabulous scientific observation in the past. It’s as if you are peering into a petri dish viewing processes that defy the imagination. And then, the Prima materia is revealed, the original matter from which every other substance can be made. Pryce makes films of wondrous beauty, that forge study and observation’s analytic view into a speculative, poetic ensemble of optics, pre-cinema and fantasy referencing the poet Lucretius, the Enlightenment and author Lewis Carroll.

Charlotte Pryce’s visual language is uniquely her own, created entirely in the darkroom by the filmmaker using an optical printer. Pryce uses the photographic medium of 16mm film and, in recent years, glass slides for magic lanterns. In the darkness of the cinema she brings hidden worlds to life using the projector’s catadioptric system in her rewarding studies on nature. A panacea against the digital era.

“My films are infused with an optical consciousness that references a tradition dating to the 16th century, when artists first made use of lenses to examine worlds hidden from sight. Questioning what is revealed and concealed by the ‘glass eye’, my films create structures of seeing that echo the mechanisms of reverie: of alert daydreaming in which the documented and the imagined are juxtaposed. Taking the form of miniature science fictions, rarely more than six minutes in length, the films are meticulously edited and deeply saturated illuminations intended to be screened in total darkness.”

Discover Charlotte Pryce’s universe in two programmes featuring nine of her films made between 1988 and 2018, including the international premiere of Pwdre Ser: the rot of stars, two suitable preludes by Henri Chomette and Stan Brakhage, as well as the magic lantern projections Tears of a Mudlark and W.H. Hudson’s Remarkable Argentine Ornithology.

Click here for more information about Charlotte Pryce and her work.

Cauleen Smith: Calling Planet Earth

H-E-L-L-O! Greetings from aliens rendered as a five-note sequence for the human species in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) is the score that notates Cauleen Smith’s 2014 short film H-E-L-L-O. But in Smith’s film, it is the humans who perform the notes – the speculative imaginary realm of science-fiction is transported to the very real space of present-day New Orleans.

This simple gesture – a playful shift or a juxtaposition – is what characterises the art of Cauleen Smith, whose works on film and video bring together archival material and imagined futures, the personal and the public, and human and non-human perspectives, all with a sense of vibrancy as she leapfrogs through time, space and minds. As her artistic practice shakes the ground, it is not uncertainty she elicits, but a renewed sense of energy as fresh soil is laid out in the collapse of how things were. Towards a potentiality for how things can be, Smith gives agency to forgotten histories, ‘uninvited’ species and black women, all of whom Western media and cinema have shown a tendency to ostracise.

From Sun Ra to Alice Coltrane

Music often becomes the hand that guides us through Cauleen Smith’s cinematic cosmos. With much of her music choices being of an improvisatory nature, the music sets a mood and rhythmic flavour, rather than dictating to us how to interpret the image. In Smith’s films, music becomes a call for communication based on the generosity of sharing, and certainly not with the intention to inform. In shaping this dialogue, she calls on the vibrant history of African-American music.

In her films, performances and installations, the Afrofuturist sounds of Sun Ra set out the flow upon which Smith places her excavations from histories of the African diaspora. Her findings, often specific to their locale, are treated with utmost respect. After premiering her debut feature, Smith left behind a film industry she felt was omnivorous in its attitude towards the outside world. While moving images continue to remain the hallmark of her practice, in art she felt able to exercise an ethics of empathy that not only extends to her subjects, but also to the viewers of her work.

Elsewhere

Within the context of the exhibition Blackout at Kunsthal Rotterdam, Cauleen Smith will also present her installation Space Station: Rainbow Ihnfinity (2014), which involves carousel slide projectors, live plants and a rainbow mural, and Black Utopia LP (2012/2019), a performance that celebrates Sun Ra and African diaspora history, for which she has created an extra carousel loaded with images from research in the Netherlands. IFFR also is screening her debut feature Drylongso (1998) and her latest film Sojourner (2018) in the Ammodo Tiger Short Competition.