Heavy as Heaven

Cameron A. Granger

5.14 — 7.9

Recollections of a home from childhood deny, challenge, and insist on narrative fidelity to a space that lives in our imagination. These visions, feelings, and interpretations shape the persons we have become in the absence of recalled effects (furnishings, wall decorations, the aromas of a favorite family meal) that constitute the environment in which we were cared for as children. Becoming adults, with lives of our own to build, these definitive memories contour our respective worldviews. We take individual experience for granted, even as the defining characteristics of the family home insist on relational coherence.

With Heavy as Heaven, artist Cameron A. Granger employs a fictionalized treatment of autobiography in a prismatic installation effort that is concentrated with familial love, community report, and social critique. Ostensibly, the story being told is about how a now haunted family house from his youth is being revisited. The protagonist (“Dom” the alter-ego of the artist) returns to this important location of his formative years to reevaluate his past, stabilize his present, and fortify himself for the future. There he finds himself engaged in an internal dialogue with the building, which vocally speaks but renders him lingually mute, only able to communicate with the house through thought. With this, we are presented with one of several delimiting conditions written into this spatial rendering of the artist’s meditation.

— Christopher Stackhouse

Cameron A. Granger (b. Cleveland, Ohio. 1993) Granger came up alongside his mother, Sandra, inheriting both her love of soul music, and habit of apologizing too much. A video artist, he uses his work as both a site for memory making, and as means to strategize new ways of remembrance in our age of mass media. He’s a 2017 alumni of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and a current artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY

Starring

Shala Miller
Dom Deshawn
Hakim Callwood

Cinematography by Jeffery Grant

3D Animation by Jaylyn Quinn Glasper

Special thank you to Kendra Bryant, Okell Lee and Reg Zehner for their production assistance.