Play Me Home unfolds across multiple works in two galleries, blending elements of filmic narrative and documentary form. Tiona Nekkia McClodden (born Blytheville Air Force Base, AR 1981) introduced her sprawling installation with a luscious scene of a blossoming four o’clock flower. Found in the southeastern United States, this variety of trumpet flower can propagate and thrive on land hostile to most plants. The bloom echoes the shape of a brass horn in the adjacent room. The instrument is a symbol of transition and grief; its sounds are a call to action. Four o’clock flower seeds flank a closed leather-bound screenplay nearby. By closing the script, McClodden has controlled the narration, alluding to the unrevealed and multi-layered forces that shape one’s life. Written over 11 years, the screenplay unfolds the imagined story of estranged lovers Genie and Butchie, two musicians in an all-female brass band. Nearing the end of her life, Genie’s last wishes are to return to New Orleans, Louisiana, and for Butchie to “play her home” in a second-line, a musical funeral procession to one’s final resting place. The screenplay, seeds, and horns tribute the reckoning with grief, but also with the land, people, and connections that endure, showing how homegoing and funerial traditions hold together the spiritual ties that bind Black families to their elders, loved ones, and ancestral land. Through closely cropped cinematic portraits of her distant relatives and widely shot scenes of Fortune Fork, Louisiana, and Port Gibson (Hermanville), Mississippi, McClodden opened portals to the sacred, charged places where her family has lived and labored as farmers across generations. The journey through the intertwined threads of Play Me Home bears witness to love, veneration, mourning, and resilience in all forms.