With supreme clarity, June Jordan passes up notions of “so-called magnificence” in her poem “On a New Year’s Eve”, turning her focus away from infinity and towards incremental possibilities. She writes:
it is this time
that matters
it is this history
I care about
the one we make together
awkward
inconsistent
as a lame cat on the loose
or quick as kids freed by the bell
This poem, specifically, calls to mind the work of Garrett Bradley, 35, the director behind the award-winning documentary , about the toll of incarceration on a Louisiana family battling the American prison system. In it, she extracts from Jordan’s lineage the tenor and pure style of what it looks like and sounds like to pay attention. To train one’s eye on what is being concealed, with full intent, and to care, devotedly, with an interior presentiment that attends to story, to the perhaps unspectacular and painful nature of truth – to its gurgling, “”. In this way, Bradley, whose projects represent a textured elasticity of both preoccupation and form – from (2019), her multi-channel video installation about Black figures from the early 20th century, to her forthcoming documentary series on Japanese tennis champion Naomi Osaka – is a director delivering a visual proposal for the future
