Zoë Hopkins: Ralph Lemon

In the titular film of Ralph Lemon’s show “From Out of Space,” we spend about twenty seconds looking at a funerary hearse covered in fallen branches. Death covers death. We might call this the credo of the exhibition, which includes photographs and videos from Lemon’s travels through the American South in the late nineties and early two-thousands and focusses on dilapidated sites marked with histories of anti-Black violence. There is Medgar Evers’s home; the decaying storefront of Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, where Emmett Till allegedly whistled at Carolyn Bryant; the piled-up remnants of a church where Mose Wright (Till’s great-uncle) was a pastor. One senses in these images both the passage of time and the piercing stillness of a catastrophe that remains with us.