mythicPotentialities (2021), is an hour-long imageless film created by Lawrence Andrews. Focused on the murder of Emmett Till and the trial that followed, this sound-based artwork examines the way events are filtered through Civil Rights documentaries like Eyes on the Prize and The Murder of Emmett Till. The piece questions the nature of historical time in the face of racial injustice. Lawrence Andrews is a two-time recipient of the NEA Individual Artist Grant and his work has shown in the Whitney Biennial and the Museum of Modern Art. Presented by Vertical Cinema and PS1.

The screening will be followed by a virtual Q&A with artist Lawrence Andrews.

 Lawrence Andrews is an artist, and currently an Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media Arts University of California, Santa Cruz, CA. His work has shown extensively throughout the U.S. and internationally in museums, galleries, and major festivals including the Whitney Biennial, The New York Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Pacific Film Archive, and the American Film Institute, as well as on cable television.

more about the work: Set in the Tallahatchie County Second District Courtroom in Sumner, Mississippi, mythicPotentialities is an exploration of the event said to have galvanized the civil rights movement in America, the murder of Emmett Till, the trial that followed, and the way these event have been mediated through documentary text like Eye’s on the Prize, The Murder of Emmet Till, and numerous other books, play’s, poems and articles. The work uses as its entry point how these text, both documentary and fiction have constructed Till’s Uncle, Moses Wright, from a limited list of predicates, and as a result fall far short of capturing the complexity of his being. The project then moves on to draws a connections between this documentary predication of Wright, and Giorgio Agamben’s resistance to predication as expressed in his notion of “whatever being”. The essay also explores, what happens when we destabilize our notion of what constitutes blackness with the absence of predication, and reconstitute it as an open space of creativity, play and invention, a place of pure potentiality, rather than a stable category of existence. Sonically the work also draws relationships between this absence of predication, and how sound space can be heard without the language we use to describe it, asking the listener to embrace the sensuous aspects of pure sound.