To study the image is to study the self, specifically the parts of the self that were “sent away” but remain anchored in one's "blues university," one's home. Shawn Peters’ process of tapping into his interpretation of a film through his memories mirrors the act of returning to the origin of one’s vision. Although I may not be able to match age to memory, Peters’ description of riding with his grandparents in a car that predated seatbelts brought me explicitly back to Annabelle, my grandmother’s 1960 Cadillac Coupe Deville [Figure 1]. White with black and white interior, even in the early 1980s, the car was a marvel of a bygone era, a time before my time. Ma never drove her Cadillac in the winter, storing it first in the garage of the family home, then to the sanctuary of Paul’s Auto Body once Ma transitioned to her apartment, only to eventually return to that very same garage—which had become ours—to rest once she drove no more. Annabelle kept time: her delivery from hibernation signaled to Ma’s entire apartment complex—and by extension, the city of Youngstown—that spring had arrived. The idea of my grandmother’s Cadillac as a time machine reinforces and doubles the power of the return—that memory which anchors me to the blues university of my upbringing. Annabelle’s departure signaled the passage of time, just as her return symbolized the turning of seasons—a social practice of continuity that lives on through memory.

No doubt, when the springtime ritual faded, winter still came and went, but the residue of that particular time-keeping remains. This is the power of the return: a refusal to let the distance of time or 'being sent' erase the sentient histories that continue to sculpt my internal landscape. The torn corners of the only photograph of Annabelle I know to exist, act as what Kya Lou might call spiritual metadata, marking the wear and labor of a memory that refuses to stay in the garage. It speaks to my practice within the slow archive: a methodical "delivering from hibernation"—a process of tracing these frayed edges to unearth the dormant textures that still orient my vision toward a communal welcoming of a new season.

Lou’s introduction to montage, i.e., putting together things not originally packaged as such, came from playing alone with Lego sets, refusing to follow the instructions, opting instead to build from her imagination. Upon hearing this, I was transported to sitting at a table with my 13-year-old son, Legacy, Legos strewn about, building a set to its “proper” specifications. For us, it is an effective exercise in following directions —perhaps a version of acquiescence to “being sent” into institutions that prioritize the script. It is in his solitude that Legacy deconstructs the set and reimagines it as something new: a clock. Another timekeeper, so to speak. Whereas my grandmother’s Cadillac kept time through its delivery from hibernation—anchoring us to a rhythm we inherited—Legacy’s Lego clocks keep time through a refusal. He is not building a set; he is gathering pieces. The vibrant, mismatched colors of his clock—much like the torn and faded edges of Annabelle’s photograph—are the physical residue of a refusal to be neat, a spiritual metadata that prioritizes the texture of the process over the polish of the product.

In this way, both the car and the clock are nonperspectival: they do not ask us to look at a timeline, but to exist within a frequency. One is the time we wait for; the other is the time we make. Together, they form the internal landscape of my slow archival work—a landscape of seeing in the way of things. By allowing the ancestral light of Peters’ memory and the radical play of Lou’s world-building to activate my own, I am engaging in a collective tuning of the internal landscape—documenting a black simultaneity where the 1960 Cadillac and the Lego clock occupy the same resonant space—a universe where we are always returning, always building, and always home.

Figures

Figure 1. Annabelle, Photo by Ma, 1982.Courtesy of the curator. Img Desc: Old, torn photo of white 1960 Cadillac in parking lot.

Figure 2. Legacy’s 24-hr clock @ 03:32. Courtesy of the curator. Img Desc: multicolored Lego pieces fashioned into a digital clock.