Will Johnson — Afterlives
Reviewed by Chenoa Baker

In the beginning was sound and the sound was a melody of violins and lyrics. The opening imagery is a cotton plant blooming on top of a black background. By isolating this imagery and causing a visual disruption paired with an audio one, the Negro Spiritual “Swing Low” becomes a fugue. In one section, the melody goes into improvisation where it says, “but home doesn't even feel like home.” It reminds me of the eerie, melancholy, and messages of tracks like “This Bitter Earth” by Dinah Washington or Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” by using ecology as a metaphor for oppression.

Johnson's visual and musical prowess is evident, as well as the ability to play with the “elasticity of memory” and “time-based processes.” He is a PhD candidate in Music and Multimedia Composition. Clear visuals of cotton reproduce like mitosis into multiples (very factory-like in its portrayal). Then the cotton plants dissipate into abstractions of their outlines in a pattern. A color spectrum cuts through the center of the screen like a broken TV would, then the recognizable King Cotton continues to grow. This is an obvious reference to chattel slavery which ruptured the socio-economic system and enslaved many African Americans. How do we imagine moving beyond this system which we have built, especially as it still haunts us?