Kenturah Davis

Los Angeles, CA/ Accra, Ghana

November 11 - December 7 , 2020

Sponsored by Lois Whitman and Eliot Hess

BIO

Kenturah Davis recently opened her first solo institutional exhibition, Everything That Cannot Be Known at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum (SCAD) in February (2020). Other solo and two-person exhibitions include Blur in the Interest of Precision, Matthew Brown Los Angeles (2019); a two-person exhibition with Desmond Lewis at Crosstown Arts, Memphis, TN in coordination with the traveling venue, Seed Space (2019); and Narratives and Meditations (2014) and sonder (2013), Papillion, Los Angeles. Public projects include Four Women, a commissioned mural by Alliance Francaise to commemorate International Women’s Day, in Accra, Ghana and Metamorphose, comprised of five portraits commissioned by architect Elliott Barnes, featured in Barnes’ installation at the Lâ Exposition AD Interieurs, Paris, France. Davis’ work has been in institutional presentations in Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe. Recent exhibitions include Language Games at the Fullerton College Museum of Art (2020); Plumb Line: Charles White and the Contemporary, curated by Essence Harden and Leigh Raiford at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Punch, curated by Nina Chanel Abney, at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA (2019); and Afrocosmologies: American Reflections, at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (2019). Other notable institutional exhibitions include: Must Risk Delight, organized in collaboration with the 56th Venice Biennale (2015); Linked in Tradition, Inspiring in Vision: A Selection of Works by African American Women Artists, Robert and Frances Museum of Art, San Bernadino, CA (2017); Black Joy, Yale University, New Haven, CT (2016); We Must Risk Delight, at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, Venice Biennale (2015); The Silence of Ordinary Things, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2015); i:23, The Yokohama Triennial, Yokohama, Japan (2014); An American Water Margin, Ucity Museum, Guangzhou, China (2014); Mass Attack, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2013); and Mis-Design, Ian Potter Museum, Melbourne, Australia (2011). Davis was commissioned by the Los Angeles Metro Rail to create large-scale, site- specific work that will be permanently installed on the new Crenshaw/LAX rail line, opening in 2020. The artist was an inaugural artist fellow at NXTHVN in New Haven, founded by Titus Kaphar and Jonathan Brand and a current DAMLI fellow at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

ARTIST STATEMENT

“The shadow of the earth reveals the true nature of the moon.”  Philosopher, Roberto Casati, in his book on shadows, renders the moon not as a glowing, weightless orb that characterizes our usual perception of it, but rather as a massive rock when viewed untouched by the light of the sun. It suggests that darkness provides as much of a space for revelation as the light, and opens up the range of conditions through which we can derive meaning in materiality. As such, I describe my inquiries as feeling my way through the dark. I wish to get in between the categories carved out in language. A constellation of objects, drawings and textiles dance around the edges of perception, and weave in between legibility and illegibility to expand the understanding of our relationship with language and also to stand in for the shortcomings of our semantics.  ***  Fundamental to my interest is a manner of approaching portraiture as a vessel capable of carrying and projecting meaning. Rather than paint images, however, I write them to inscribe the histories that entangle us. Layering text to the point of illegibility signals the complexities of how we absorb and embody ideas conveyed through language. Understanding that language interferes, as much as it aids us in shaping our perceptions, I’ve followed the path of the written line to a woven one to further my investigation outside of figuration. Unconventional looms and other structures incorporate forms and materials that suggest, and occasionally embody a liminal space. I make flexible forms that blurs distinctions like movement/stillness, opacity and transparency, soft/hard, levity/gravity. I find these qualities so meaningful because they can be mapped onto our understanding of any given person or thing we interact with and, consequently, our judgements about them. While still committed to portraiture, my expanding sculptural practice finds different strategies outside figuration to explore concepts around the mysterious, the illegible and the space of things just at the edge of perception. 

ARTIST LINKS

Website: www.kenturah.com/

Instagram: @kenturah