Cauleen Sith X Total Luxury Sa – FESCH.TV

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

Total Luxury Spa announces its integral Artist Series, beginning quarterly with American-born, California-based filmmaker, Afrofuturist multimedia artist and educator Cauleen Smith (b 1967).

Following fruitful collaborations with Cyprien Gaillard, Meriem Bennani, Ulysses Jenkins, Lauren Halsey and Xavier Veilhan, TLS remains enthusiastic amplifying the discourse between Art and the accelerating cultural of fashion. At this intersection, together we aspire toward an interactive social sculpture that celebrates the tangible but is larger than a simple commodity.

With distribution focused through a Fine Art lense, including The Hammer and Whitney museums, Total Luxury Spa presents a limited edition release, inviting both the Art audience as well as the existing TLS audience to engage through the lense of Contemporary Art.

Cauleen Smith is an artist who makes films, installations, and objects. She actively invites engagement, and with much of the work she employs a purposeful undermining of image and language to elicit contemplation. Smith’s films create worlds that expand on the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental filmmaking. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, she assembles poetic compositions that gently reveal nuanced narratives, both familiar, and oftentimes, purposefully opaque. Her text-based tapestries follow a historic tradition of heraldry. These banners, which can be understood as a social device symbolizing community organizing, declare personalized idioms sewn in script that simulates her own handwriting, lifted directly from her sketchbook. Through her installations, Smith constructs archetypes of the universe and she assembles miniature worlds using myriad items, which often include mundane object and figurines alongside symbols of colonialism, such as porcelain objects and potted plants, paired with disco balls, rocks and minerals, resulting in something otherworldly and also museological. For Smith, consideration of the audience is an important element of her process, and she uses a full range of media and references to express her belief in utopian potentiality.

Directed by: Daniel DeSure
DP: Andrew Truong
1st AC: Michelle Suh
2nd AC: Chastin Noblett
Sound: Jedy Shiheng Xu
Production Manager: Aundre Buyard