Annual Program of Artists' Film & Video
With support from the Department of Art & Art History, University Museums, and the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Richmond; Frames of Reference showcases some of the most creative, challenging, thoughtful and visionary artists working in film, video, and alternative media today. Programs feature artists and artworks that resist conventions and ideologies of mainstream media; explore creative, innovative approaches to narrative and experiments in time-based media; and embrace unique viewpoints, perspectives, or frames of reference.
Frames of Reference is organized, programmed, and presented by Jeremy Drummond and all programs feature in-person Q&A's with featured artists and filmmakers.
Always free. Always open to the public.
Screening location:
Jepson Hall 118
University of Richmond
Updates and announcements:
2025–2026 Events
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Cauleen Smith
Program 1: Wednesday, Sept. 3, 6 p.m.
Songs for Earth and Folk, 10:39, 2013
Sine at the Canyon Sine at the Sea, 7:06, 2016
Triangle Trade, 14:31, 2017
My Caldera, 4:55, 2022
Mines or Caves, 9:40, 2023
All the Money, 4:13, 2024
The Deep West Assembly, 34:46, 2024Program 2: Thursday, Sept. 4, 6 p.m.
Remote Viewing, 15:25, 2009
Elsewhere, 4:53, 2009
Demon Fuzz, 4:50, 2010
Ergungun: Ancestor Can’t Find Me, 5:19, 2015
In The Wake, 5:15, 2017
Sojourner, 22:03, 2018
Emanation, Don’t Break, 10:58, 2022
Homegirls, 17:44, 2024Cauleen Smith is an artist who makes films, installations, and objects. She actively invites engagement, and with much of the work she employs a purposeful undermining of image and language to elicit contemplation. Smith’s films create worlds that expand on the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental filmmaking. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, she assembles poetic compositions that gently reveal nuanced narratives, both familiar, and oftentimes, purposefully opaque. Her text-based tapestries follow a historic tradition of heraldry. These banners, which can be understood as a social device symbolizing community organizing, declare personalized idioms sewn in script that simulates her own handwriting, lifted directly from her sketchbook. Through her installations, Smith constructs archetypes of the universe and she assembles miniature worlds using myriad items, which often include mundane object and figurines alongside symbols of colonialism, such as porcelain objects and potted plants, paired with disco balls, rocks and minerals, resulting in something otherworldly and also museological. For Smith, consideration of the audience is an important element of her process, and she uses a full range of media and references to express her belief in utopian potentiality.
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Kevin Jerome Everson & Claudrena N. Harold
Program 1: Wednesday, Nov. 19, 6 p.m.
Program 2: Thursday, Nov. 20, 6 p.m. -
Ephraim Asili
Program 1: Wednesday, Jan. 21, 6 p.m.
Program 2: Thursday, Jan. 22, 6 p.m. -
Christopher Harris
Program 1: Wednesday, Feb. 18, 6 p.m.
Program 2: Thursday, Feb. 19, 6 p.m. -
Kathryn Ramey
Program 1: Wednesday, Mar. 18, 6 p.m.
Program 2: Thursday, Mar. 19, 6 p.m.
Media Coverage
Unscripted Life
Art professor Jeremy Drummond brings world-class filmmakers to campus through his Frames of Reference film series.
UR Now, September 17, 2024
Jeremy Drummond, an art professor of experimental film, video art, and alternative media in the art & art history department, has always loved movies, beginning with his high school years as a video store clerk in Vancouver, British Columbia. As an art school undergraduate, he tried his hand at painting and printmaking but found his true medium after meeting visiting video artist Steve Reinke.
“At the time, his work had shown at the Museum of Modern Art and a bunch of other places. He was what you might call an art star. He introduced me to video as an art form, and it just immediately clicked,” said Drummond. By the time Drummond was in his fourth year, Reinke had introduced him to numerous people in the field. Before he graduated, he had a piece premiering at the New York Underground Film Festival.
Today, Drummond enjoys being of similar support to his students — many who arrive with preconceived notions of the medium. He takes them through what he describes as an unlearning process. “There are no rules,” he tells them.
A past winner of the Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award, he works closely with students in the visual and media arts practice (VMAP) program and introduces them to other leading contemporary artists in film and video when they come to campus through his Frames of Reference series.
“The series is an annual program that showcases some of the most creative, challenging, thoughtful and visionary artists working in film and video today,” Drummond said. “And the mission is to show media that resists conventions and ideologies of mainstream media and explores creative, innovative approaches to narrative.”
Transformative Viewing
UR’s Jeremy Drummond invites renowned film and video artists to Richmond for his series, Frames of Reference.
by Sommer Browning, Style Weekly, March 6, 2024
Filmmaker Jeremy Drummond, an associate professor of art at the University of Richmond, isn’t a huge fan of using the word “experimental” to describe film and video art. “When I think of the term ‘experimental,’” he says, “I can’t get John Cage’s idea out of my mind that if the artist knows what the end result of an artwork is going to be, it’s not truly experimental.”
That definition is too limiting for Frames of Reference, the series that Drummond programs at the University of Richmond—so that’s why he eschewed it for the subtitle: “an annual program of artists’ film and video.”
“Artists’ film and video speaks to a larger body of work and a way of working that foregrounds production,” he says. It refers to work “based on breaking boundaries, pushing new forms of creativity, rethinking modes of working with time-based media, and dealing with topics that are seen as challenging or missing from dominant media culture.”