The Dark Tower

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THE DARK TOWER curated by Cauleen Smith

 

ArtWalk on Thursday, May 14th 

& Thursday, June 11th:  12-9pm 

Reception for the Artists on 

Friday, May 29th: 6-10pm 

 

                                                                                                                     drawing by Louis Schmidt © 2009

 

In fairy tales the dark tower imprisons. In poems it taunts and beckons, or shelters and protects. In sci-fi narratives, the dark tower is not so much a destination as a portal-mirror that negotiates slippages in space and time and reflects our latent desires back to us. 

The Dark Tower exists. 

It is within the tower that, like the works in this show, our bodies may stretch along a sliver of time, tumble within a quantum of space, and warm to the heat that travels to us as light from stars that guide our way. For the purposes of describing the artists that the show’s title seeks to bind, I looked to the imagery of two poems. (“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855) by British poet Robert Browning and “From The Dark Tower” (1927) by black gay American poet Countee Cullen) Browning’s poem describes the arduous journey toward The Dark Tower, and Mr. Cullen’s poem leads us away. However, it is the short-lived but seminal American salon, named after Mr. Cullen’s poem, that this show most powerfully invokes. 

In Browning’s poem, the Childe (untested knight) Roland, wanders lost in the wastelands that challenge and deceive him as he attempts to reach the dark tower. At one point in his journey, the young knight, must cross a river littered with the bodies of those who have come before him. 

By contrast, Countee Cullen describes the artist as an attendant to precious germinations that might one day safely escape the dark tower to be embraced by the broad light of day. In 1928, on the one hundred and thirty-sixth west block of Harlem USA, heiress A’Lelia Walker, daughter of Madame CJ Walker – hair care magnate and first black American woman to become a millionaire, converted a floor of her glorious Brownstone into a salon and named it after Countee Cullens’ poem. She gathered together the raucous and brilliant stalwarts of the Harlem Renaissance, various international gadflies, and Greenwich Village aesthetes like Carl Van Vechten (who had been a constant fixture at Mabel Dodge’s salons in the lower east side). A’Lelia Walker’s Dark Tower was lit for only a year, after which Harlem’s salon lady died at the age of 46. When she passed, Langston Hughes declared that the glory days of Harlem died with her. Indeed, in 1931, the glory days of American industrial power were dying as well. 

And so it goes that The Dark Tower with its ability to fold time, compress space, and re-animate the body [so much like the artists presented] finds us today in the flotsam of hedge funds and the wreckage of mortgage-backed securities. One can no longer assume that a Masters of Fine Arts from a reputable institution entitles one to leap form their cramped campus studio into a one-person show at a glistening New York gallery like a debutant in the order of myths. One may leap indeed, but like Browning’s Childe Roland, the landing, even if one arrives at one’s chosen destination, may not hold the promises that looked so tantalizing from afar. What happens, if like Browning’s Childe, we arrive at the tower and discover that it is the end, rather than the beginning? What then? Browning, Cullen, and certainly A’lelia Walker exemplar, all declared that it is the journey that matters- and the dream. 

So here we are slipping through time. The year is two thousand and nine. The place is compactspace. The artists are twenty-seven MFA candidates at UCSD who welcomed me into their studios for conversation and shared this slice of their journey with me, one of the more recent additions to the faculty. This salon extends our conversations into the present moment so that we may look through this ephemeral window, lit just long enough for those seeking the tower to join us. 

–Cauleen Smith 

WORK by: 

Shane Anderson / Susy Bielak / Crystal Z. Campbell 

Micha Cárdenas / Mauricio Chernovetsky / Lili Chin 

Ted Chung / Leigh Cole / Micki Davis / Monica Duncan 

Nico Herbst / Glenna Jennings / Merve Kayan 

Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli / Dolissa Medina / Elle Mehrmand 

Chuck Miller / Vincent Manganello / Jesse Mockrin 

Zac Monday / Clare Parry / Brianna Rigg / Lesha Rodriquez 

Louis Schmidt / The Community Insourcing Bureau 

Julia Westerbeke / Suzanne Wright / Claire Zitzow 

 

105 E 6th Street 

Los Angeles, CA 90014 

(626) 676-0627 

www.compactspace.com 

May 14th through June 27

Group Show curated by media artist Cauleen Smith

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on October 18, 2008
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Cauleen Smith was born in Riverside, California and grew up in Sacramento, California. She received a BA from San Francisco State University from The School of Creative Arts in 1989. She earned an MFA from The School of Theater-Television-Film, University of California, Los Angeles in 1998. She is currently assistant professor in the department of Media and Performing Arts at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA after holding an assistant professor position at the University of Texas at Austin in the department of Radio-TV-Film for five years. Her short film Daily Rains (1990) was selected for Sundance Film Festival in 1991. Another short, Chronicles of a Lying Spirit By Kelly Gabron (1991), was the only film at the 1991 The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar Exhibition to screen twice by audience demand. In 1993, Smith was invited by the San Francisco Cinemateque to create a site-specific installation which was then adapted as part of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Inaugural Show. In 1994, Cauleen Smith was awarded funding from the Rockefeller Inter-Cultural Media Arts Fellowship, the American Film Institute Independent Film and Videomaker Program, the National Black Programming Consortium, and a Western States Regional Fellowship which she used to write, direct and produce her first narrative feature film, Drylongso (1998). Drylongso was selected for the American Spectrum of Sundance Film Festival, won an honorable mention from the Hamptons Film Festival, and Best Feature Film at Urbanworld, and the Los Angeles Pan-African film festival. In 1999 Cauleen Smith was chosen as one of “Variety” magazine’s “10 Directors to Watch”. She was awarded the Movado Someone to Watch Award by the Los Angeles IFP Independent Spirit Awards. Smith’s experimental science-fiction short, The Changing Same (1998), was programmed in the 2001 exhibition “Race in Digital Space” at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that show traveled on to the Studio Museum of Harlem, winter 2002. In 2003, The Changing Same, along with another short White Suit (1997) were programmed into the international Afrofuturist show “Black to the Future” at Cinema De Baile the Netherlands, Amsterdam. The films also aired on Dutch television station Kunstkanaal in November of 2003. In 2001 Smith’s screenplay, I Am Furious Black was selected for the Sundance Lab Writer’s Lab 2001, then again for the Sundance Lab Director’s Lab 2001. She adapted Martha Southgate’s sophomore novel, Third Girl From the Left for the screen, the project is currently in development with Kerrie Washington attached. Smith is currently developing a feature length project, Rebecca (Working Title) to be produced in Lagos Nigeria. Development funding has been provided by Art Matters Foundation. In 2005, Smith was honored to receive Technology support grant from The National Video Databank for the preservation of earlier work. She also received a Texas Film Production Fund grant from The Austin Film Society for a series of film-portraits of artists and art facilitators in Austin, Texas entitled The Nebula Project. After two attempts, over two semester, the senior engineering students built a prototype of an apparatus that can hold over one thousand feet of 16mm film in the air in one continuous loop. The prototype debuted at MASS Gallery in Austin Texas for one night onlyin May of 2007. Smith plans on continue the portraiture process from city to city wherever she resides. Cauleen Smith’s short films are distributed by Canyon Cinema. Her feature length film is available for rental exclusively at Hollywood Video stores nationwide.