There is a distinctive restraint in Lay Me Down in Praise, 2022, Justen LeRoy’s three-channel—and to my head, 3 chapter—video set up at Artwork + Apply (the present is a collaboration concerning 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 music of the Black church, which reveal a singer’s variety and psychological dexterity—have analogs in many geological procedures and routines. Nevertheless even with this all-encompassing conceit, it’s noteworthy that the artist is measured with his metaphors and embellishments. In LeRoy’s progressive arrangement of video portraits and appears, interpolated with all-natural landscapes—a “Black environmental strategy,” as he phrases it—the earliest sung be aware doesn’t appear until the previous moments of the work’s first chapter.
LeRoy has a distinctive interest in songs. For the Hammer Museum’s 2020 version of Created in L.A., he contributed an audio collage, On God, 2020, that includes voice notes from pals and family members, music throughout various genres, and a collection of several sounds, including falling rain and the trill of a dial tone. This piece intimates the day-to-day noises LeRoy listened to at his father’s barbershop growing up. Lay Me Down is a continuation of this collage get the job done, with sourced and authentic online video footage from LeRoy and a collaborator, artist and filmmaker Kordae Jatafa Henry.
Lay Me Down is greatest absorbed from a posture as near to the ground as probable so that you can really feel the vibrations made by the work’s bass. From this vantage, you can see how the screens are arranged all-around the viewer, like open up arms going in for an embrace. Scenes of waves, shore birds, and people seated with hands raised heavenward blink into a second chapter of glaciers melting into impossibly blue seas. The 1st sung observe is expressed like a problem, as though it were a voice listening to by itself for the initial time. It conveys something past phrases and is total of meaning—maybe the sight of a glacier breaking is the best way to explain it. By the 3rd and ultimate chapter, the melismas are much more self-specified and layered. Lava erupts from a volcano. A person’s cradling arms fill the cradling screens. Basaltic magma flows down a slope even though the notes stretch on, building flesh and earth solemnly but strategically converge.
— Ruth Gebreyesus