Mining for Meaning

Originally published in Family Style.

Cauleen Smith looks out the window of her room and sees the top of Aspen Art Museum, where her immersive installation Mines to Caves debuted last Thursday. Above the museum, her eyes dance up a small, tree-lined mountain, stopping along with large homes that flank the bottom half. “That would have been an animal habitat once upon a time, and it probably still is to a certain extent,” she muses. The Los Angeles-based artist’s exhibition draws from the time she spent in the ski town last year, exploring a now-defunct silver mine and eventually capturing the natural wonder and human footprint that marks its tunnels in an experimental film that she projected on its walls.

Over the years, Smith has made over 40 experimental short films, as well as fabric banners, sculptures, poetry, works on paper, and site-specific installations. At the Aspen Art Museum, she meditates on mankind’s endless cycle of extraction.

Throughout her practice, Smith has been thinking about the relationship between the ways capitalist structures affect the world we live in. Here in Colorado, she thinks about extraction: about the bears and elk that have lost their habitat due to land development, and about a type of palm tree native to Sierra Leone that is soon-to-be extinct due to its proclivity to grow atop diamonds. Smith also considers the human lives that are inextricable from anecdotes of climate change: the powerful players behind the scenes and the millions caught in the crossfires.

The artist, who got her start with the 1998 film Drylongso, which addressed the high death rates of young Black American men and women head-on, has never been one to shy away from shining a light on the injustices of the world. But unlike a journalist who is constrained by facts, Smith is an artist with a more open-ended approach to capturing the dualities of the world around her.

“The best thing about art is that I don’t have to worry about facts. I can actually feel; I can speculate on what is possible based on what people did. I don’t necessarily make up things about the people I’m studying, but I do sort of place them in a more speculative space,” she offers. “My job is to really move people towards curiosity and towards an enthusiasm for what’s possible.

Social justice issues and environmental issues are inextricable for Smith. “The attempt to control the environment that we live in creates some kind of hierarchy about who that control is for,” she says. “There’s always a cost to the way that we currently decide how to engage with the planet that we live on, and that cost is always really impactful on other living beings, animals and humans alike.” At the Aspen Art Museum, Smith’s film casts a spell on the mine, transforming it into a cave, a more “natural state that gives us shelter instead of being about what we can take from it.”

Cauleen Smith: Mines to Caves is on view at the Aspen Art Museum at 637 E Hyman Ave, Aspen, CO 81611 through April 7, 2024.

Meka Boyle: You had a residence with the Aspen Art Museum and Anderson Ranch in Spring 2022, which led to you to create your experimental film “Gimme Shelter: Cineglyphs” that you presented an intervention projected on Aspen’s Smuggler Mine walls. Now, you have recontextualized your film with an immersive installation at the Aspen Art Museum, Mines to Caves. How were you influenced by your time at the Anderson Ranch?

Cauleen Smith: I was invited to go to Anderson Ranch because I was already doing a lot of research around minerals and geology and whatnot, but I’d never really spent time in the Colorado mountains. We went on a tour of the Aspen Smuggler Mine, and I met Chris Preusch who owned the mine. He had so much knowledge and enthusiasm about the history of that place and life experience as a kid exploring it. It was really inspiring in terms of what could be possible in terms of making an installation there.

MB: Had you been in a mine before, or was that your first time getting to explore the tunnels?

CS: No, I had never been in a mine. I’ve been in caves before, and I kind of expected them to feel the same way. I was really surprised at how different they are because there’s something about a cave: Usually they’ve been worn through with water and lava and things like that. They have a more tranquil feeling. But the mines are these man-made burrows into the mountain; they have these very odd turns based on where they’re going to find whatever they’re looking for. It doesn’t have any kind of logic that you might associate with a natural formation. I began thinking about the difference between a mine and a cave, and how the mine is clearly not a place to get shelter in the way that you might think of a cave. And so that was sort of the beginning of thinking about how to make the films for the Smuggler Mine.

MB: Normally when people are going through mines, they’re looking for one specific mineral or metal, and then I’m thinking of you as an artist going through and maybe having more of an existential or open-ended search as you’re being led through these very specific, directory tunnels.

CS: It was so great going through the mine with Chris, the owner, because he had explored it as a kid. So for him, it kind of was like exploring a cave. There’s something about the way that they made the tunnels go straight to where they wanted to mine; there’s no idea of a natural flow. Meanwhile, the water is still dripping through everywhere, going on a totally different trajectory than the tunnel. It’s a very interesting tension between what the mountain is doing naturally and what you have to do if you’re gonna mine it.

MB: “Gimme Shelter,” which includes hieroglyphs of images of animals from the area projected on the mine’s walls. How did you choose what to project in the mine? What was the thought process behind opening up this dialogue that you then created?

CS: It was really fun. Before the time I spent here in Aspen during the residency, I had never seen an elk herd before. I’d never really encountered a bear before, and I was really scared to, but I finally ran into one in the middle of town. It was really cool to also think about this habitat or really the way that the animals are kind of losing the habitat. I’m looking out my window here in Aspen now, and there’s just less and less habitat for animals and more and more houses. So it’s no surprise that they’re wandering around town trying to get into dumpsters.

MB: What’s out your window right now? Are you in nature or are you in the middle of the town?

CS: I’m in the center of Aspen. Actually my view: I can see the top floor of the Aspen Museum, then behind it a small mountain, but there are big, big houses going halfway up that mountain — I would think that that would have been an animal habitat once upon a time, and it probably still is to a certain extent

MB: A hundred percent. In your early work like your film Drylongso, which actually just got restored this year, address the racial injustices and the very real terror felt by Black Americans through the story of a young artist’s pursuit of a serial killer who has been killing young Black men in her community. Now your work addresses climate injustice and the way that capitalist structures and over consumption and land development affect the world we live in and also lead to high death rates and lower qualities of life. Can you speak about these connections between racial injustice and climate injustice? In many people’s lived experiences, these binaries don’t exist, but then for others, the connections are a lot more latent. What do you think about those connections?

CS: That’s a great question because they are absolutely connected, and I actually wouldn’t even think of them as different topics. They are completely interrelated, mainly in the way the attempt to control the environment that we live in creates some kind of hierarchy about who that control is for. There’s always a cost to the way that we currently decide how to engage with the planet that we live on, and that cost is always really impactful on other living beings, animals and humans alike. The urgency of these issues is increasing every day, and we need ways to address it from all fronts: from political tactics and policy to art and spirituality and academic study: how we study, how we do religion, how we do art, how we do politics should also be examined. Those are the things that I am always thinking about.

MB: Totally. When I read about the real life events that inspired the serial killer in your first film Drylongso, 1998, I was so blown away. Learning about how you discovered a serial killer while transcribing the news at night for a job, I couldn’t stop thinking about the stark feeling you must have had seeing the deaths of young Black women in Los Angeles pile up but not seeing the connection acknowledged in the media. Then also, you were in the group of people that were vulnerable. When I learned about this, I gasped.

CS: It was wild. Even now, I remember trying to tell people what was happening.

MB: And then when the world finally catches up and makes the connection that yes, there was a serial killer. I’m sure that validation didn’t really feel that great at all.

CS: When I learned about the serial killer 10 years later, I cried. A friend of mine from film school was like “hey, they found your serial killer,” and he sent me the article. I was so devastated that it was real. I was totally fine with thinking that I was imagining it.

MB: Have you noticed any differences or similarities in how the public responds to your art discussing racial issues and your art discussing climate issues?

CS: In the film industry in the late ’90s and early aughts, there was a very narrow idea of what Black filmmakers were supposed to be making work about. The people making the decisions would think: this isn’t interesting to me and therefore it’s not interesting to anyone, so it won’t be profitable. With the climate, there’s this concern that you have to make this topic entertaining. And that’s kind of the same thing with Black stories. These things are so linked: When we look at how we treat other people and how we treat animals, it’s no surprise that we’re just proceeding with this way of living on the planet that is causing climate change. It’s not a surprise. I know that’s not really a nice thing, and people don’t always appreciate that.

MB: It feels so obvious when you say put it that way. But then like you said, not everyone wants to hear it. Maybe because it’s a lot of accountability: People don’t want to have to change their consumption habits — which are so much a part of identity under capitalism — just because the animals being farmed for fast food meals or people working in the factories aren’t being treated fairly.

CS: But it’s also the fact that all of those irresponsibilities are offloaded onto us as individuals — instead of being a larger project — and that we accept that burden, and maybe we shouldn’t. I know that sounds radical, but it’s actually just not even a controversial statement. It’s just facts.

MB: I read that you have also been researching cooperative living spaces, and that you are planning a research trip to Mississippi for a film project about the history of Black intentional co-ops.

CS: I visited a lot of sites, and I stayed at one co-op in West Jackson, Mississippi. It was really amazing to visit Mississippi for the first time and meet Black and indigenous activists doing so much incredible work that doesn’t really surface as a subject of interest. When I learned about Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm, I was so enthralled. For nine years, people lived communally and collectively, and it’s not talked about now I guess because it only lasted nine years, it is considered a failure. But I think that is a wild success. It’s really the kind of story that I am eager to take on. I don’t make documentaries, but I think I can make some art that helps people understand it: it has these beautiful ripples and waves and things we can learn from.

MB: Right. Art is a way to document the spirit of these movements or practices and offer an entry point for people to learn more.

CS: The best thing about art is that I don’t have to worry about facts. I can actually feel; I can speculate on what is possible based on what people did. I don’t necessarily make up things about the people I’m studying, but I do sort of place them in a more speculative space so that you get excited about what was happening, what was possible, what they were really doing. Journalism has a different job: to give us the information. But I think my job is to really move people towards curiosity and towards an enthusiasm for what’s possible.

MB: It goes along with how Afrofuturism reimagines reality to create a better present or future.

CS: Having that imaginative space lets us see what they were striving for in that moment as well as what the larger implications are, what it could become. What can that teach us? There’s really nothing that people haven’t tried in some shape or form that we can’t learn from, and I love that. To me, it’s deeply inspiring that people have always been trying and experimenting with how to live differently, more kindly.

MB: This leads me to a much more specific question about the way you take elements from the world and recontextualize them to imaginative ends: In Aspen, you have a wallpaper with Pandanus candelabrum, a type of palm tree that grows in Africa and is endangered. What was the decision to include a plant that’s not native to Aspen into a work that deals so much with the local landscape?

CS: The whole room at the Aspen Art Museum is asking people to consider a relationship with extraction, right? So, the film was very much inspired by and has footage of Smuggler Mine, and that was a silver mine. But the process of mining is endlessly ongoing, which is why I wanted to do a wallpaper, because it endlessly repeats.

So the wallpaper is another meditation on this relationship to the extraction. So when you see this tree growing in Sierra Leone, you know that there’s going to be kimberlite rock under it, which means there’s gonna be diamonds. It’s horrible because do we really even need any diamonds? The heartbreak that people would be pressed into killing off entire systems just to get at some rocks seems incredibly tragic, and we’re constantly doing it. So even if we’re not mining diamonds, we’re mining lithium; we’re having wars about lithium mines right now. And the idea is that because we’re doing this because it’s better for the planet, and I’m not sure that it is. So I wanted to meditate on this endless cycle of extraction and its violence.

To me, the film in the room is like casting a spell on that mine and turning it back into a cave sort, in a weird way appropriating all the love that the owner of the mine has for the mine and returning it to a more natural state that gives us shelter instead of being about what we can take from it.