AGE: 35
BASED IN: Tulsa
For artist Le'Andra LeSeur, history is an embodied experience.
Her multimedia practice grapples with the weight of the past on people navigating the present. For her New York institutional debut “Monument Eternal,” on view at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works, LeSeur decided to dig into a history close to home.
“When I moved from the Bronx to Georgia at the age of 11, my family would visit Stone Mountain Park,” the multimedia artist recalls. “Then I started digging into that site’s history.” The 3,200-acre park—the state’s most popular recreational destination—is the infamous home of the Confederate Memorial Carving, a massive, 190-foot-wide high-relief sculpture of three Confederate leaders. “Stone Mountain is where the modern KKK was rebirthed,” explains LeSeur. Completed in 1972, the monument—which is larger than Mount Rushmore—is protected from removal or alteration by Georgia state law.
LeSeur’s complex feelings around her relationship to Stone Mountain are the subject of “Monument Eternal,” on view through Dec. 15. Anchoring the exhibition, which borrows its title from Alice Coltrane’s biography, is a seven-minute film that stitches together footage of LeSeur in slow-motion free fall from the mountain’s peak. The film is narrated by the artist, in the form of spoken word poetry. “How could I consider my own Black queer body as a monument that I could honor in this place?” asks LeSeur. “Collapse becomes a space, an opening, allowing for an experience of transcendence.”
LeSeur, now a Tulsa Artist Fellow, played college basketball at Bucknell University before finding her way to art when she enrolled in a class on a whim. Perhaps as a result of this early athletic career, the body—its limitations and its triumphs—figures consistently in her practice. At Pioneer Works, LeSeur debuts a series of glassworks, which interested her as a means of capturing her breath. “I have an understanding of my body’s physical presence, a sense of control physically in terms of what I can endure,” says LeSeur. “In my work, there is a spiritual element that allows me to push past the physical to whatever’s beyond."
