• Out of Town

In her immersive video installation, Just to Be Close to You, artist Laneya Billingsley, aka Billie Ocean, employs the virtual space of the video screen as a field of pure fantasy and feeling, where she wrestles with personal and inherited social conflicts, taking 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, while playfully exploring the possibilities in embodied self-realization.