There is a unique restraint in Lay Me Down in Praise, 2022, Justen LeRoy’s three-channel—and to my thoughts, 3 chapter—video set up at Artwork + Practice (the present is a collaboration involving A + P and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles). The multidisciplinary LA-born and -raised artist believes that melismas—vocal runs popularized by R&B new music and rooted in the tunes of the Black church, which demonstrate a singer’s array and emotional dexterity—have analogs in different geological procedures and activities. Nevertheless even with this all-encompassing conceit, it is noteworthy that the artist is measured with his metaphors and gildings. In LeRoy’s progressive arrangement of online video portraits and appears, interpolated with organic landscapes—a “Black environmental system,” as he conditions it—the earliest sung take note doesn’t seem till the past moments of the work’s very first chapter.
LeRoy has a special fascination in audio. For the Hammer Museum’s 2020 version of Created in L.A., he contributed an audio collage, On God, 2020, showcasing voice notes from pals and spouse and children, songs throughout diverse genres, and a assortment of several seems, together with falling rain and the trill of a dial tone. This piece intimates the day to day noises LeRoy read at his father’s barbershop expanding up. Lay Me Down is a continuation of this collage do the job, with sourced and unique video footage from LeRoy and a collaborator, artist and filmmaker Kordae Jatafa Henry.
Lay Me Down is finest absorbed from a posture as close to the floor as achievable so that you can sense the vibrations generated by the work’s bass. From this vantage, you can see how the screens are organized all over the viewer, like open up arms going in for an embrace. Scenes of waves, shore birds, and persons seated with palms lifted heavenward blink into a second chapter of glaciers melting into impossibly blue seas. The first sung notice is expressed like a concern, as though it were being a voice listening to by itself for the first time. It conveys a thing outside of text and is complete of meaning—maybe the sight of a glacier breaking is the very best way to explain it. By the 3rd and closing chapter, the melismas are much more self-certain and layered. Lava erupts from a volcano. A person’s cradling arms fill the cradling screens. Basaltic magma flows down a slope although the notes stretch on, earning flesh and earth solemnly but strategically converge.
— Ruth Gebreyesus