There’s a three-sided cinema suspended like a hovering cloud in an unlit gallery at the Frye Art Museum. Slow-motion, black-and-white footage plays on the triangle of screens, continuously but unsynchronized, unleashing a rolling tide of triple superimposition.
You see horses, riders, bleachers, a lightning-cracked sky. Floating by, you hear a score by experimental hiphop giant Flying Lotus: the sounds of cheering, a downpour, electronic buzzes, a bass string insistently plucked. The creator and director of the film is Kahlil Joseph, and he shot the footage at the rodeo in the town of Grayson, Oklahoma, one of many towns founded by African Americans meaning to find self-governance in this country between 1865 and 1915. The triangle of dirt on the floor of the gallery is from the rodeo, with bits of real litter left in it. All-Black towns are not, in this work, only things of the past. Or the future. They are eternal, and the eternal is here. The goose bumps tell you that…
