TNM Play Me Home Four O’clock Bloom #12 Sept 14, 2021

I am minting a total of twenty – two (22) Timelapses documenting the blooming life cycle of the flower before it was buried on Dec 5, 2021 at dusk on land in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, Louisiana. I started growing this flower in North Philadelphia last year from seeds taken from Louisiana last year as a study for the larger work. One bulb survived and I maintained this offspring flower in a small pot in my apt in North Philadelphia and grew it inside, first observing its growth via security cameras while I traveled and then capturing the first bloom via timelapse on August 28, 2021.

Timelapses were captured on location in North Philadelphia, PA from Aug 28 – Oct 4, 2021.

The collector will receive a single seed from this flower’s bloom cycle.

Send mailing info to tnm@tionam.com

About the larger body of work: ‘Play Me Home’ is a new work centered around several intertwined threads featuring a series of narrative portraits. A filmic portrait of the Four O’clock flower, a variety of trumpet flower known for its ability to propagate and thrive on land hostile to most plant life. The Four O’clock flower grows wild throughout the Delta region, on the same lands where the artist’s family settled as some of the earliest Black sharecropping farmers in the Delta, and where they still own and maintain farmland. This view onto historical Black relationships to land, property, and livelihood in the region is the focus of the channel situated within the sole monitor in the space. Other filmic portraits present scenes from the burial and planting of the dying flower by McClodden on land in the Lower Ninth ward of New Orleans alongside the two trumpets (witnesses), as well as documentation of the land that McClodden’s family has lived throughout the Delta. A leather-bound feature-length script draft, a work in progress for over a decade, centers the fictional narrative of an elderly Black woman’s return to New Orleans, where she once played in an all-female brass band, as she comes to the end of her life. The work’s title references Black musical funerary traditions, as well as honoring lesser-acknowledged sites and modalities of “home” for Black people living in the U.S.

Play Me Home, 2021 by Tiona Nekkia McClodden is on view now as a part of the Prospect New Orleans Triennial P5 at Xavier University of Louisiana until Jan 23, 2022

You can learn more about the work here: tionam.com/playmehome