Cauleen Smith

Cauleen Smith: My name is Cauleen Smith. I'm a filmmaker and visual artist.

Narrator: Smith sketched the texts on the front of these banners in 2015.

Cauleen Smith: I think this country was on its fifth or sixth videotaped police shooting and I was just sort of incredibly disgusted and angry and fatigued by the whole culture of this country.

The phrases are either things like "no wonder I go under" or "you don't hear me though." There's always either an accusation or a pointing at self or other, and, to me, the "I" or the "you" or the "me" can shift and does shift depending on who you are when you're reading it.

On the back of each banner there's a system of symbols and a lot of them repeat. People ask me in particular about why pencils and the pencil, the microphone and the camera aperture are all to me these instruments of expression. They're apertures for a voice, for initiative, for articulation, and so the pencil becomes this very flexible tool that can even be a weapon, can be kindling for a fire. It can do a lot of different things, not all of them affirmative, or affirming.

I actually think that art might be the only thing at this point. Not protesting, and not politics, but art may be the only thing that could actually create conversation and dialogue or reconciliation or mediation. Because politics has just completely failed us. What I hope my work is capable of is for individuals, it's for just any one person. If there's just enough of an opening in them that they think about themselves or the world or just think, and not even think differently, but just think for a moment. Just contemplate. Just open up a little bit, then I've done my job. Whereas politics is really about the martialing and controlling and deployment of power, and in order to have that power you have to have a lot of people in agreement functioning as a force. To me, that's the opposite of what art does.