Le’Andra LeSeur’s Monument Everlasting, now at Pioneer Works, is many issues directly. It’s a confrontation, an unraveling, a type of alchemy. Marking the artist’s debut institutional solo exhibition, the present attracts on LeSeur’s childhood recollections of visiting Georgia’s Stone Mountain Park, the place harmless joys of household picnics and fireworks mingled with the mountain’s weightier, sinister historical past.
Stone Mountain is not only any mountain — it’s an embodiment of White supremacy and colonization, a bitter legacy of stolen and desecrated Indigenous land. The resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan could be marked to Thanksgiving evening of 1915, when it assembled on the summit; the group would proceed to make use of the positioning for rituals and celebration. Carved into the mountain’s north facet is the biggest bas-relief carving on this planet, a tribute to a misplaced trigger, depicting three Accomplice leaders (Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, “Stonewall” Jackson) in monstrous glory. The carving, accomplished a mere 50 years in the past, is a provocation, immortalizing on an enormous, unabashed scale figures whose complete legacy lies within the subjugation of others.
For LeSeur, Stone Mountain is as a lot a monument to White supremacy as it’s a testomony to the violence visited on the our bodies and minds of Black individuals who come into contact with it. Monument Everlasting — from a haunting video set up to tactile works that pulse with the artist’s breath — considers the burden of that violence and the felt pressure of transferring via and being marked by areas that uphold racist legacies.
Movie nonetheless of Le’Andra LeSeur, “Monument Eternal” (2024) (courtesy the artist)
The impact of this pressure is felt most powerfully within the exhibition’s titular movie, a seven-minute video set up that each anchors and disorients the viewer. The video begins with the picture of LeSeur’s physique — strong but fragile — falling in gradual movement atop Stone Mountain’s granite peak. In voiceover, LeSeur recites a poem in opposition to a rhythmic drumbeat — a heartbeat, maybe — asking, “Why must I collapse? Why must I fall?”
As her physique collapses again and again, a brand new type of poetry emerges: not the fearful chorus of “why?” however the poignancy of accepting the inevitable. The previous has its personal gravity; it’s at all times urgent on us. And but, at some factors, she appears to be like as if she just isn’t falling however merely floating in opposition to the backdrop of a vibrant blue sky. Monument Everlasting is not only about falling; it’s about fall gracefully, survive a fall, and what it means to fall time and again and nonetheless discover a technique to rise. Every fall suggests a special story — a Black physique in motion, in flux, is at all times greater than an object to be crushed beneath the gravity of White supremacy. It’s, as LeSeur says within the video’s narration, “A soft place to land.”
Different works within the present current visible echoes of this central theme. “A faint touch of bones remembering” (2023), a portray LeSeur created throughout her residency at Pioneer Works, is an impression of her experiences at Stone Mountain. The canvas is layered with jagged traces clashing with delicate washes of watercolor, deep earth tones interrupted by sudden flashes of vibrant, unnatural blues, every brushstroke a translation of how her physique reacted throughout visits to the mountain: a nervous flick of the wrist, a sudden consumption of breath. The portray is subsequently a type of map, a file of the physique’s actions, every reminiscence of communion with the land embedded inside it.
Set up view of Le’Andra LeSeur: Monument Everlasting (photograph by Olympia Shannon, courtesy Pioneer Works)
In “Sustaining Bloom (After Porteri)” (2024), LeSeur attracts on the resilience of the yellow daisies that develop improbably on Stone Mountain’s barren floor. Right here, the artist as soon as once more interprets the act of survival in inhospitable environments into motion, this time utilizing charcoal and hibiscus to create a portrait of fragility and persistence. LeSeur, importantly, just isn’t romanticizing this survival. As a substitute, she exhibits us what it prices — the marks of wrestle, the violence of present in a spot that doesn’t need you to stay. The exhibition culminates with a pair of mouth-blown stained glass panels, “A soft place to land…” (2024), set reverse the video set up. Casting a delicate glow all through the gallery, it remembers the sanctuary of a church, remodeling the house into one among virtually holy contemplation.
It’s no accident that this present attracts its identify from Alice Coltrane’s forthcoming autobiography. The late musician and non secular chief wrote of searching for transcendence, of pushing her physique and spirit to new dimensions, believing that solely in extremes might she discover peace. LeSeur’s work is a type of parallel journey: a ritual of the physique, a motion via ache that additionally gestures past it.
LeSeur’s work is as a lot concerning the land as it’s concerning the self. To carve right into a mountain is to scar the earth. To navigate a racist monument as a queer Black girl is to hold the load of that scar. Monument Everlasting asks: What can we do with these wounds? How do we feature them? And what, if something, can develop from the locations which were marred? By way of visceral, corporeal gestures, LeSeur doesn’t simply doc trauma — she reconfigures it right into a psychic website from which one can nonetheless bloom into one thing tender, one thing fierce, one thing everlasting.
Set up view of Le’Andra LeSeur: Monument Everlasting (photograph by Olympia Shannon, courtesy Pioneer Works)
Le’Andra LeSeur: Monument Everlasting continues at Pioneer Works (159 Pioneer Road, Brooklyn) via December 15. The exhibition was organized by Vivian Chui.
