Cauleen Smith + A. Van Jordan @ testsite: Opening Reception 11.5.2006

Film artist Cauleen Smith is collaborating with award winning writer and fellow University of Texas at Austin professor, A. Van Jordan on testsite 06.5: I want to see my skirt. Do go to the website. There is a striking production still that folks who have seen the various permutations of Smith's The Green Dress art project will recognize. It would seem this collaboration harkens to some of the visual themes and/or is a further incarnation of the earlier project which also dealt with questions of aesthetics, identity, and stylized representations.


I want to see my skirt

a collaboration between

Cauleen Smith and A. Van Jordan

Opening Reception: Sunday, November 5 from 6-8 pm
Poetry Reading with A. Van Jordan at 6:30 pm

On view though December 14
open Thursdays (except Thanksgiving Day, November 23), 5:30-8 pm,
Tuesday, November 21, 5:30-8 pm and by appointment

testsite | 502 West 33rd Street | Austin, Texas 78704
info@fluentcollab.org

I Want to See My Skirt, Cauleen Smith and A. Van Jordan’s
collaboration at testsite, takes its title and inspiration from the photographs of Malick Sidibé (Mali, 1935- ). A new suite of poems by
Jordan and a film installation by Smith consider the construction of identity through style and images while probing beyond the surface of
the cloth to examine interpersonal relationships fashioned between Sidibé’s most iconic subjects.
(Pictured above, a casting call postcard for the project)

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Some additional background on Jordan, who wrote the acclaimed poetry collection M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (2004) based on the life of MacNolia Cox, an Akron Ohio girl who became the first African American finalist in national spelling bee competition in Washington, D.C. when she competed in 1936. To hear A. Van Jordon reading from M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A on NPR go here. An interview with Jordan published in Callaloo, by journal founder and editor Charles Henry Rowell, which requires muse.jh.edu subscriber access.

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Update 11.02.2006: It looks like the production stills from the actual film for I want to see my skirt are up on testsite. I hope folks will check them out as they are also beautiful, Smith and her poetic way with color, light, texture, film stock, and black folks skin tones are in real effect. Yet you'll see a markedly different aesthetic than with the earlier The Green Dress. (image at left from CodeZ's coverage of the exhibit)