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Psychedelic experiences are identified to provide impressions each agonizing and euphoric. Evaporating linear time, these trance states droop the boundaries between ache and pleasure, enacting a heady fusion. In Paul Stephen Benjamin’s solo exhibition “Black Summer season,” the artist immerses guests on this otherworldly realm, presenting works whereby Black pleasure and loss seamlessly converge.
The centerpiece of Benjamin’s intervention is Billie Vacation’s 1959 efficiency of the anti-lynching elegy “Unusual Fruit.” The music’s lyrics, which emanate from a classic tv set on the gallery’s flooring, have been abridged to loop the haunting chorus, “Black our bodies swinging within the Southern breeze.” Flanking that set are two extra TVs that includes Jill Scott’s 2015 efficiency of the identical tune which, like Vacation’s rendition, attracts its energy from the identical guttural ache. Behind the vocalists, a towering pyramid of 13 tv screens performs discovered footage, solid in vibrant cerulean hues, of a Black little one on a swing set. Transferring towards and away from the viewer in a steady tidal wave, their guileless sway endows Vacation’s mournful lyric with a shocking levity.
From the seemingly dissonant states of heartache and surprise of this set up, titled Summer season Breeze, 2018, Benjamin manages to extract a profound concord, mining its contours to unearth advanced truths about Black life. As Vacation’s quietly steadfast resolve within the black-and-white broadcast rubs up in opposition to Scott’s colour video and fuller, extra declarative voice, their phrases concurrently memorialize the twilight of lives violently misplaced and have fun the hopeful daybreak of younger lives simply starting. Beneath the ocean of blue mild and sonic reverberations, these affective and temporal polarities bleed collectively till they’re one and the identical.
On an reverse wall, the star-shaped cluster of black lights comprising Black Suns (Ode to Tom Lloyd), 2023, floods the gallery with an indigo glow. An homage to the titular abstractionist whose work with photic applied sciences expanded the canon of Black artistry, its rays are each ominous and exhilarating, grounding us within the transcendent terrain of Black existence.
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