About the Work

Just to Be Close to You, the latest work by artist Laneya Billingsley, aka Billie Ocean, is a three-walled video installation, which employs the virtual space of the video screen as an immersive field of fantasy and feeling, where one can work through the personal and inherited conflicts integral to the dialectics of self-realization. The piece takes the form of a video game in which the artist’s avatar moves through stages of spiritual development by completing tasks and finding tokens, symbolic of essential lessons, before moving on: a key, a photograph of her grandmother, a needle, a ball of light.

For Billingsley, personal growth requires wrestling with one’s past and the relationships with others that shape who we are. It is a healing process, ultimately rooted in the erotic body, and its effects are shared by those we love. It requires coming to terms with difficulties – to integrate them into our psyches in new and different ways – with the hope of arriving at a place where their enduring pain has less of a hold on us. It is a process of learning what ideas, assumptions, and organizing stories keep us enthralled to stifling and destructive patterns, enabling us to give them up or, at least, to allow them to be transformed.

Despite its difficulty, Billingsley presents this process as richly enjoyable: an adventure in the fullness of life. She takes a deep dive down the rabbit hole of the mind, conjuring complex feelings and communing with imagos of her ancestors. She surrounds her audience with fantastical figures, sensuously bathing them in colored light, and playfully exploring the possibilities in embodied self-realization.