YES! LORD PARADISE REMIX
an animated film by Christina McPhee
with music by Ashon Crawley
Otherwise Revival
Bridge Projects, Los Angeles 2021
Christina McPhee: Regeneration
video installation at Kino Saito, Verplank, New York 2022
"In Yes! Lord: Paradise Remix, Ashon T. Crawley and Christina McPhee bear witness to transformational experience, shifting vocals and abstract animations in call and response around two generative sources, an ancient sacred landscape and a revered composition from the seventies. Starting from Mono Lake, California, McPhee’s images are flying through the high desert, generating waves of energy, and interacting with the lake’s tufa formations. Ribbons of ight, morphing fractals, shimmers like stained glass, and water droplets dance to Crawley’s repetitive, praise-filled invocation 'Yes! Lord,' set to the ground-breaking, iterative pulse of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. McPhee’s trance-like imagery performs constant and intricate ellipses, slipping into and out of the lake, and moving into a future space of 'otherwise possibilities.' Crawley’s voice layers two words like concentrated cascades alongside, over and through Music. He writes, 'The praise song and chant, “Yes, Lord”... produces transition while also being the transition itself… cuts and is being cut, that grounds and is being grounded, this song, this chant, is an arrival and rupture through a word, yes.' • " -- Cara Megan Lewis
•Crawley, Ashon T., Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, 2017, p. 161.
Sound design by the artists with gratitude to Steve Reich for permissions via publisher Boosey and Hawkes, 2021.
Below: installation images of Yes! Lord Paradise Remix in the exhibition at Kino Saito, Verplanck, New York, March 2021. Photographs: Chika Kobari.