{"id":686,"date":"2022-02-09T22:38:25","date_gmt":"2022-02-09T22:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/articultures.com\/?page_id=686"},"modified":"2022-02-09T22:38:25","modified_gmt":"2022-02-09T22:38:25","slug":"leila-weefurs-hymns-for-other-voices","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/articultures.com\/?page_id=686","title":{"rendered":"Leila Weefur\u2019s Hymns for Other Voices"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Profile of Leila Weefur<\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Barbara Morris<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Explorations of gender identity are central to the work of artist and curator Leila Weefur, and how they felt that their identity was suppressed by belonging to the Christian Church is at the crux of their latest project, Prey<\/em>\u253c<\/em>Play, <\/em>presented in two separate and complementary incarnations, one at Minnesota St. Project, as part of their California Black Voices Project, the other at Telematic Media Arts. Many such twinnings and juxtapositions are found in Weefur’s work, who laughs and acknowledge that \u201cYes, I’m pretty interested in duality.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We meet at Minnesota St. Project on one of the artist’s rare days away from her teaching responsibilities, this fall Weefur is a lecturer at both Stanford and U.C. Berkeley. Their own academic background includes an undergraduate degree in journalism from Howard University, followed by a degree in film from Cal State LA. Weefur then spent several years in the film industry in LA, working on music videos, independent films and reality shows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was during this time working in the film industry that Weefur decided to shift to fine art. In the 2010s, it was before the advent of the \u201cmovement around contemporary Black cinema\u201d and their interests in any event lay outside the \u201cformulaic structure\u201d often found in Hollywood. Seeking out a liberal arts college, Weefur returned to the Bay Area, to Mills College, where their interests in cross-disciplinary exploration were satisfied by studies in the book arts, creative writing and music departments. The latter is where they met composers Josh Casey and Yari Bundy, who form the duo KYN, with whom Weefur has continued to collaborate on the immersive soundtracks for numerous projects, up to and including Prey<\/em>\u253c<\/em>Play<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Weefur’s current work builds on earlier film installations such as Blackberry Pastorale Symphony #1<\/em>(2017), Noise and Thirst <\/em>(2018), and Between Beauty and Horror <\/em>(2019).<\/em> The first references the phrase, \u201cThe blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,\u201d a reference to the idea that darker skinned black women were somehow perceived as more voluptuous, sexier, in the context of \u201ccolorism,\u201d racism against darker-skinned Blacks. Weefur, who never connected with the idea of the femme black body, creates potent images of men and women interacting with, crushing, and consuming, blackberries. Noise and Thirst<\/em> evolved in response to the artist being accused of stealing from a market in San Francisco by a woman who described Weefur to the police as a \u201cBlack man.\u201d It functions as \u201can experimental sound collage expressing the cadences of Black masculinity.\u201dBetween Beauty and Horror<\/em> \u201cteases out the uncomfortable dynamics and violence that are present in racism\u201d and, as the artist describes it, \u201cperformative Blackness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Between Beauty and Horror<\/em>, 2019, video still, courtesy of the artist.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Drawing on their personal experience of the constraints and rigidity implicit in the Black Christian Church, Weefur paints a picture that is nuanced and bittersweet, with the pageantry and allure of the church, it’s promise of salvation and the love of God, contrasted with the subtle and not-so-subtle ways religion has worked to control those under its sway. At Minnesota Street Project Prey<\/em>\u253c<\/em>Play: A Gospel <\/em>is set ina darkened space defined by three imposing arches. The video is set in Havenscourt Community Church in Oakland, where the artist was baptized, with red-upholstered pews and stained-glass windows. We hear a childlike voice speaking. \u201cStand up. Bow your head. Bring the palms of your hands together. Close your eyes. Talk to God.\u201d As the narrator speaks, the actors perform symbolic gestures. Weefur intends the nonbinary characters to act as a point of entry for many different people\u2014a spectrum of LGBTQ and BIPOC, as well as many others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The narrator continues, \u201cDear God, can you see me?\u2026I come in afraid to show myself.\u201d At a young age, perhaps 10, Weefur first became aware of gender discomfort, \u201cI knew I was never going to give birth to a child,\u201d and their parents eventually relented and allowed them to wear pants, rather than a dress, to church; they left the church after baptism at age 15. The narrator speaks \u201cPower is only power if everyone wants it, and no one has it. I used the only power I had, the power to remove myself from view.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The actors hide within the pews, then reveal themselves, playing hide and seek, then peek-a-boo. These gentle games act as a metaphor for earlier experiences. The atmosphere darkens as a stern voice intones lines from Black writer and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones<\/em>, \u201csermons\u201d on themes common in Black preaching, and the image of the verse Judgment Day appears on the screen. We see images of fire, candles burning, a charred sprig of blackberries. This leads us into the work at Telematic Media Arts, Prey<\/em>\u253c<\/em>Play: The Old Testament<\/em>, where Weefur fills the screen with an image of a burning bible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Telematic, a much more compact space, sandwiches the viewer between the imagery as a burning book sizzles and snaps, gray flakes of ash curling up and blowing off. Turning, one is startled to catch their own reflection immersed in the video\u2014this side actually a reflection. Weefur likes to catch one off guard, \u201cseeing themselves implicated in the work structurally and conceptually.\u201d Wax candles in the form of crosses lie heaped in one corner, the contribution of collaborator Sandy Williams IV. There are 506 of these, equal to the number of times the word \u201cfire\u201d appears in the King James Version of the bible. A performance event was also held by Weefur in the nearby St. Joseph’s Art Foundation, with five other queer and trans writers invited to share \u201cprayers\u201d to be performed with ritual within the highly charged environment of this former Catholic church.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Winding down our conversation at Minnesota St. Project, Weefur reflects for a moment, then speaks, \u201c\u2026it’s like a child wanting to run around on a field of grass, but there are sanctions that tell you you can only run so far. Like Jim Crow laws, it tells you there’s only one place you can go. That certain places aren’t for you.\u201d Addressing issues very much of this moment, Weefur’s fascinating work raises uncomfortable questions of how we see ourselves, and each other, on a very fundamental and intimate level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leila Weefur\u2019s Hymns for Other Voices<\/strong> was originally published in the Jan\/Feb 2022 issue of Artillery<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Profile of Leila Weefur by Barbara Morris Explorations of gender identity are central to the work of artist and curator Leila Weefur, and how they felt that their identity was suppressed by belonging to the Christian Church is at the crux of their latest project, Prey\u253cPlay, presented in two separate and complementary incarnations, one at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-686","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/articultures.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/articultures.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/articultures.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/articultures.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/articultures.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/articultures.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":689,"href":"https:\/\/articultures.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/686\/revisions\/689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/articultures.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}