Le’Andra LeSeur and the Eternal Ephemerality of Suspension
Installation view of Monument Eternal, 2024. Photo: Chris Uhren. Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.
The Pittsburgh edition of Le’Andra LeSeur’s solo exhibition Monument Eternal (which began at Pioneer Works in 2024) extends the artist’s investigation of monumentality at the scale of the body to elucidate the hidden-in-plain-sight quality of American racism’s effects on the Black psyche, physical body, and environments. At the Wood Street Galleries—one of four gallery spaces administered by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, the show opens with a set of shelves housing books selected by the artist that inspired the works on display: a biography of Alice Coltrane, a book of poetry by Alice Walker, and multiple mass-market editions of Henry Miller’s controversial Black Spring, among others.
“I awoke,” announces LeSeur after the title credit for the video Monument Eternal, projected on the center wall of a gallery flanked by a cerulean blue blown glass sculpture and amber stained-glass panels. A shot of clouds drifting across the sky cuts to LeSeur filmed from behind from a low angle. Her hair and plain white T-shirt catch the breeze; calm prevails. She narrates, in an even tone at a tempered pace, her bodily relationship between past and present, self and ancestry, punctuated by scholarly citations from Kathryn Yusoff and Édouard Glissant that hold onto Black relation in chaos even when racialized death structures the “human” destruction of the Anthropocene. Cut to a close-up of LeSeur’s face with eyes closed; serenity seems sure. Another cut, to her bare feet rocking backward on a stone surface; instability and uncertainty are introduced. She falls backward in slow motion, her body suspended in midair on the rocky plateau with a lush, summer-verdant forest below. The artist describes Monument Eternal as a “poetic translation of the body in collapse,” as she repeatedly throws herself against the top of Stone Mountain in Georgia. This site of a bas-relief carved monument to the Confederacy was an important place in LeSeur’s childhood. The monument is captured frontally in an opening shot of the memorial carving that slowly zooms out while a reverbed-out version of the spiritual “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen” plays. Monument Eternal, a reference to Alice Coltrane’s metaphysical autobiography, slows and stills the site of violence. The video distills LeSeur’s repeated falling against this site of racist memorial—LeSeur described having to end filming earlier than expected because of the physical toll—into a moment prolonged by slow motion.
Installation view of Le’Andra LeSeur’s Do you know this place since your breath is no longer here and A soft place to land. Photo: Chris Uhren. Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.
The blown glass pieces included in this room materialize the prolonged moment before landing, before harm, into an expansive moment of brevity. The cerulean blue of A soft place to land captures the artificial light entering the room through the patchwork amber-tinted stained glass of windows, titled Do you know this place since your breath is no longer here. Together, they augment the tension between the material and the immaterial explored in the video as foreshadowed-yet-obscured contact between the bodily and the environmental. “See, I’ve never seen the color blue melt,” LeSeur says toward the end of Monument Eternal, “but in the burdening of air after blue there’s a hint of orange agitated as the noise becomes clearer.” These glass works participate in what scholar Jean-Thomas Tremblay names “breathing aesthetics,” where breathing becomes a site of necropolitical surveillance as well as a site to creatively contest these forms of subjugation.
Le’Andra LeSeur. A Faint Touch of Bones Remembering, 2024. Photo: Chris Uhren. Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.
Further widening the encounter between stone (as monument) and the Black queer body, the paintings and drawings included in Monument Eternal meditate on endurance in the face of profound pain. The lower level of the exhibition includes two of LeSeur’s paintings that respond to the kinetic relationship between body and “insurgent geologies,” to return to Yusoff’s theorization of “Black Anthropocenes,” with large-scale abstractions. A faint touch of bones remembering presses against the significatory limits of gesture. The work is painted in thin washes of oil and gouache that permeate the linen, accentuating the material interaction between pigment and support. This is a landscape of Stone Mountain composed of colors that harken back to the artist’s childhood memories of the site—Robin egg blue, pastel yellow, forest green—and meld them with her bodily reactions to the site in the present. The second painting, titled Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, furthers the concatenation of memory, futurity, and environment through gestural abstraction. The title itself proliferates in associations; it is drawn from Alice Walker’s fourth poetry collection, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1984), which itself comes from a Native American shaman’s reflection on the colonial transformation of the landscape with the introduction of horses. The plant-based pigment washes, like the deep fuchsia and indigo produced by hibiscus, ground a composition that otherwise swirls with movement. With these expansive vertiginous blurs, LeSeur continues the meditation on beauty and pain as a continuum held across body and land explored filmically in Monument Eternal.
Le’Andra LeSeur, Sustaining Bloom (After Porteri) 1, 2024. Photo: Chris Uhren. Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.
The three drawings similarly trace geographic place (Stone Mountain) through gesture. However, they are intimate, their scale accentuated by their framing with a dramatic negative space of mat. These drawings record explorations of habitual preconscious movements and act as a bridge between the upper and lower levels of the exhibition. Titled Sustaining Bloom (After Porteri), LeSeur dwells in intimate fidgets by drawing on cotton paper with layers of charcoal and floral dyes. The delicate charcoal shading, hatching, and cross-hatching resemble cloud studies or an abstract frottage. A faded wash of hibiscus flowers formally unites the drawings with the larger paintings. The third drawing in the series also includes a dull yellow alongside this light puce tone. LeSeur extracted this pigment herself from “Stone Mountain” daisies collected around the monument, likening their harsh rocky environment to her own ambivalence around resilience. The “Stone Mountain” or “Confederate” daisy is a flower of misnomers. Helianthus porteri is not actually a daisy (Bellis), but a sunflower. While rare, the flower is not only endemic to Stone Mountain, as popularly believed, but also grows in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Consequently, its association with places and organizations of American racism—Stone Mountain as Confederate monument—is not entirely justified; I note the fact that Helianthus porteri was discovered in 1849 and named after Thomas Conrad Porter, the Pennsylvania minister who collected it. Rather than rely on representations of the flowers themselves, Sustaining Bloom (After Porteri) visualizes connections across scale and environment through the artist’s own gestural recollection.
Installation view of Le’Andra LeSeur’s Black Spring | The Moment is Mist, 2025. Photo: Chris Uhren. Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.
The discovery of this false daisy by a Pennsylvania botanist furnishes a point of connection between Monument Eternal and Black Spring | The Moment is Mist, the second video piece included in the show. Here, LeSeur reconfigures the visual language of Monument Eternal to grapple with sites of Black loss and institutional amnesia local to Pittsburgh. During her visits to the city, LeSeur was captivated by the missing archives of the Pittsburgh Courier (1913–22), the city’s oldest Black newspaper. The five-channel video opens with a rare 1984 recording of Phyllis Hyman—a soul singer born in Philadelphia and raised in Pittsburgh—singing “Gonna Make Changes” at the Kennedy Center. Her performance flickers off and on across the screens, a fugitive movement that showcases Hyman’s talent without reducing her to the mental illness that precipitated her suicide in 1995. About a third of the way through the film, Hyman’s vocals recede to a reverbed background as LeSeur, again shot from below on one of Pittsburgh’s many bridges, spins on one screen to the sound and image of film running through a reel. Then silence; followed by the sound of ebbing and flowing water and footage of a gray-blue sky. LeSeur reads a passage from Henry Miller’s Black Spring, which, along with the 2001 Algerian Black Spring, informs the work’s title. A recitation of crossings and suspension, issued in LeSeur’s even cadence, recalls being held in midair the moment before making contact with the ground.
In its entirety, the exhibition dwells in the ways anti-Blackness is held in the body and mind; yet her practice does not end with violence and dispossession, nor does it uphold endurance and persistence as unequivocally virtuous. Rather, LeSeur seeks the fleeting moments of transcendence in the interstice, in suspension, in the moment between falling and landing. “We can float,” she announces in Monument Eternal, “we don’t have to break, we don’t have to shatter.” Monument Eternal engages a broader contemporary aesthetic challenge to the objects, places, and people commemorated as momentous in a nation predicated upon enslavement, exploitation, and disenfranchisement. Fascism proves itself time again inefficient and ineffective in its ruse, albeit a tenacious one. From the perspective of Black queer corporeality in the twilight of a neoliberal present, LeSeur’s work repudiates promises of redemption in persistence while also evading a nihilistic resignation to non-being. Held in the eternal ephemerality of suspension before the crash, a different path may appear.
Le’Andra LeSeur: Monument Eternal is on view at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust from February 1st to May 17th, 2025.
