Justen LeRoy at Art + Practice
There is a distinctive restraint in Lay Me Down in Praise, 2022, Justen LeRoy’s three-channel—and to my head, a few chapter—video installation at Artwork + Exercise (the exhibit is a collaboration concerning A + P and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles). The multidisciplinary LA-born and -elevated artist believes that melismas—vocal operates popularized by R&B new music and rooted in the songs of the Black church, which exhibit a singer’s selection and psychological dexterity—have analogs in numerous geological processes and functions. Yet even with this all-encompassing conceit, it’s noteworthy that the artist is calculated with his metaphors and elaborations. In LeRoy’s progressive arrangement of movie portraits and sounds, interpolated with purely natural landscapes—a “Black environmental strategy,” as he phrases it—the earliest sung observe doesn’t seem until the past moments of the work’s first chapter.
LeRoy has a specific curiosity in music. For the Hammer Museum’s 2020