LOS ANGELES – “I feel like a kid for the first time,” an interviewee tells I will keep my soul, a 90-minute film by British artist Helen Cammock. The film is mounted as a diptych. In one half, its subject, a black person in light jeans sitting on a park bench, reflects on her tree climbing experience, while in the other half, the person does just that. Because of “darkness and homosexuality,” they point out, “there is a hiding of desires and pleasures that I feel like I don’t have access to. »
The dance between dissimulation and resistance is at the heart of I will keep my soulwhich is in the center of Cammock’s personal exhibition of the same name. On view until August 5 at Art and Practice in Leimert Park, it expresses the artist’s recent research at the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and the Amistad Research Center. Surrounding the gallery space are visual poems, ceramics, and even the sound of her trumpet, which she began practicing in New Orleans.
“If you take everything you like just because you like it,” says one poem, “just because you want it, ghosts will have no place to play and children no place to rest. ” His poems read like missives resulting from his research: “Blue n0tes/swing/in a/humid/breeze” and “To learn to/dance/ with fireflies/first/accept the/dark”. Books by thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Walker and Bell Hooks are laid out on a worktable, as if giving a glimpse into the artist’s workspace.
The film theoretically centers on the story of late artist Elizabeth Catlett’s struggles to establish the Louis Armstrong sculpture in Armstrong Park in New Orleans in 1976. That said, Cammock achieves this depiction through interviews with unnamed subjects , which become poetic about different aspects of life in New Orleans. Without context, viewers view the city through the lens of the speakers’ stories rather than their specific titles, accomplishments and stories.
One interviewee, a music teacher, confesses that he didn’t think women could play the trumpet, “because I didn’t see them play and then it wasn’t until I went to jazz camp in Loyola, that’s where I saw the first girl really playing the trumpet…. And I was like, okay, girls can play trumpets too. Alongside the teacher in the diptych are his pupils – three school-aged girls playing the trumpet as he guides them through the lessons.
Between interviews, Cammock takes us into the New Orleans landscape, with some long, lingering shots of the Mississippi River, house details, trees, and waterfront parks. These create the backdrop for a film that feels like an eponymous meditation on the soul of creative life in the city. “The artist has less of a say,” notes one interviewee of the difficulties encountered in developing his creative career while maintaining a livelihood. “You know they might have all the determination, but they don’t have the same determination.”
Catlett’s words appear alongside artists talking about their contemporary struggles, as if offering advice from the past. “Advancing is difficult,” reads one quote, “and straying from the accepted path is dangerous, but difficulty and danger are old acquaintances.”
Helen Cammock: I will keep my soul continues at Art + Practice (3401 West 43rd Place, Leimert Park, Los Angeles) through August 5. The exhibition was organized by the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought (Rivers) and the California African American Museum (CAAM). It was organized by Jordan Amirkhani and Andrea Andersson, Rivers, in partnership with Essence Harden, CAAM, as part of a multi-year collaboration between Rivers and CAAM.
