Cauleen Smith: Give It Or Leave It

About

Cauleen Smith is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. A traveling solo exhibition of film, video, and installations, Give It Or Leave It features a series of experimental portraits of different sites related to spirituality, creativity, and utopianism. Much of the research conducted for Smith’s film projects has taken place in California, on location at Alice Coltrane’s ashram, The Vedantic Center, and in history through a restaging of a photograph of nine dapper black men taken in 1966 at the Watts Towers by Bill Ray. Additional archival research delves into the 19th-century black spiritualist Rebecca Cox Jackson, who was the Eldress of the first black Shaker community in Philadelphia. These separate and unrelated universes coalesce into an emotional cosmos in Give It Or Leave It.