Justen LeRoy at Art + Practice
There is a distinctive restraint in Lay Me Down in Praise, 2022, Justen LeRoy’s a few-channel—and to my intellect, 3 chapter—video installation at Artwork + Practice (the exhibit is a collaboration among A + P and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles). The multidisciplinary LA-born and -elevated artist thinks that melismas—vocal operates popularized by R&B songs and rooted in the music of the Black church, which exhibit a singer’s array and emotional dexterity—have analogs in many geological procedures and activities. But even with this all-encompassing conceit, it is noteworthy that the artist is calculated with his metaphors and gildings. In LeRoy’s progressive arrangement of video clip portraits and appears, interpolated with pure landscapes—a “Black environmental tactic,” as he terms it—the earliest sung observe does not seem right until the final moments of the work’s initial chapter.
LeRoy has a distinctive fascination in new music. For the Hammer Museum’s 2020 version of Manufactured in L.A., he contributed an audio collage, On God, 2020, featuring voice notes from pals and household, music throughout various genres, and a variety of various appears, which includes falling rain and the trill of a dial tone. This piece intimates the each day noises LeRoy heard at his father’s barbershop growing up. Lay Me Down is a continuation of this collage work, with sourced and authentic movie footage from LeRoy and a collaborator, artist and filmmaker Kordae Jatafa Henry.
Lay Me Down is best absorbed from a position as near to the ground as achievable so that you can truly feel the vibrations generated by the work’s bass. From this vantage, you can see how the screens are arranged all-around the viewer, like open up arms heading in for an embrace. Scenes of waves, shore birds, and people today seated with arms elevated heavenward blink into a 2nd chapter of glaciers melting into impossibly blue seas. The to start with sung observe is expressed like a query, as while it were a voice listening to itself for the initially time. It conveys something over and above words and is entire of meaning—maybe the sight of a glacier breaking is the finest way to describe it. By the 3rd and remaining chapter, the melismas are much more self-sure and layered. Lava erupts from a volcano. A person’s cradling arms fill the cradling screens. Basaltic magma flows down a slope whilst the notes extend on, building flesh and earth solemnly but strategically converge.
— Ruth Gebreyesus
