Installation view of Spotlight: Kenturah Davis at The FLAG Art Foundation, 2023
Photography by Steven Probert
Spotlight: Kenturah Davis
JUNE 16-JULY 14, 2023
After-Hours Viewing
Wednesday, June 28, 5-7 PM
The Spotlight exhibition series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork accompanied by a commissioned piece of writing. It is the hope of this series to create focused and thoughtful dialogues between the visual arts and critics, poets, scholars, etc. In this iteration, the Spotlight features Kenturah Davis’s planar vessel XVII, 2023, with a text by writer and critic Zoë Hopkins.
On Kenturah Davis’s planar vessel XVII, 2023
By Zoë Hopkins
Come closer, for the words reveal themselves slowly. Like speech that emerges into itself from a whisper.
Wavering in and out of visibility, a swarm of miniscule text floats in pool of thin green ink, cautiously rising from and then stealing back into the right-hand panel of Kenturah Davis’s planar vessel XVII, 2023. Words burrow themselves into the shadows of charcoal, flickering amongst the contours of a figure drawn in three quarters. Face tilted up and away from our gaze, she holds the text in tender secrecy, masking it underneath her form until the viewer steps close enough to realize there is something else there.
Indeed, this figure’s presence is a vessel of meaning: she carries and contains language, taking care that not too much leaks out into the world. Though she seems to withhold the text from us, she in fact makes its legibility possible. The text—an essay written by the artist herself—has been stamped or “debossed” into the paper. It is only when charcoal runs over the low-relief text that language become visible, surfacing in light green against the dark lines the figure is drawn from. Language and text are irreducibly linked; they are both foreground and background. Here, we encounter a text made of drawing and a figure made of words.
Approach and read, the text calls out from the shadows, beckoning my inquisitive eye closer. Linger with me. I step in, nosy about all those words, greedy for all their meaning. Engaging the work requires a pas-de-deux of sorts, a complex negotiation between distance and proximity in which I find myself dancing to accomplish both looking and reading. The figure dances with me: as the text rises into view, she begins to move, to shape shift. The charcoal drawing is based on a long exposure photograph of a woman turning her head, yielding a soft blurring of form where the camera recorded her movement. Thus, the drawing is not of a static, unitary figure, but of motion. It is an index of a durational, kinetic encounter between body and camera. It is made of flight and flux, of a transience that escapes legibility, much like Davis’s debossed text does when there are no shadows to illuminate it.
I lean in to read, and as I narrow in on the text, the figure melts into rivulets of charcoal, becoming pure line. She is no longer a body, but a chameleonic mass of light and shadow. I cannot, then, simultaneously read the text and see the figure in her totality. As a viewer, I want to return to the stable illusion of her wholeness, to hold this wholeness distinct from the charcoal shadows that she is made up. But as a reader, I am in fact beholden to these shadows. I cannot peel myself away from the dark as I search for meaning. As Davis writes, “shadows articulate form and help us identify edges. They are the first thing to respond to an event, always ready to show us how contingent our perception of the world is, relative to the way the light dances around us.”
Beneath the shadows of her contours, ink stains the paper with bursts of emerald. It runs soft and liquid above the linear ordering of the text and grid marks that structure the picture plane. The ink Davis uses in her planar vessel series is literally called “fugitive ink,” in reference to the capricious sense of autonomy that inheres to its molecular configuration: the chemical makeup of the ink is such that it lightens over time according to the atmospheric conditions it occupies. [1] Though its changing appearance is bound to external contingencies, the ink is also unreservedly free in its capacity to elude predictability, to behave in ways that we cannot control. The very materiality of planar vessel XVII, then, is a testament to the work’s ways of being, to its gorgeous semiotics of transience and changeability.
The work hosts a second text in its right-hand panel, this one folded up in total inscrutability. Davis fashioned the panel by way of shifu weaving, an ancient Japanese technique in which paper is cut up into threads and then woven together. [2] But Davis’s shifu is (literally) marked by the additional intervention of writing: the artist inscribed West African proverbs and philosophical excerpts onto the paper before cutting it and transfiguring it into its present woven form. The only evidence of her handwriting are the deep greens, reds, purples that reside in the weaving—chromatic testimonies to the inks Davis used in her writing. The script that lives on the paper is itself undone, spliced, and braided into a schema of tightly woven thread, encoded in warp and weft. Thus, the weaving is not only patterned material, but a site of encrypted and ancestral knowledge, a container of thought hermetically sealed away in Davis’s fibers.
The text is sealed away, yet its meaning continues to live inside the work, continues to exert a kind of infravisual force from inside the panel. In centering but simultaneously obscuring the texts of her West African ancestry, Davis’s work gives primacy to an inherent yet invisible knowledge: those ancestral forces which are not seen, but deeply felt.
What happens when thought slips out of sight but remains ineffably there?
I want to think of dissolution of Davis’s handwriting into textile/texture as a quiet epistemic rebellion. More specifically, I want to think of this disappearance as a wrestling with—or even a destabilization of—Western hierarchies of information that equate seeing with verifiable knowledge and feeling with sensuous deceit. [3] The quiet, concealed presence of a non-Western—specifically African—writing in Davis’s work opens a long line of inquiry that throws these hierarchies into fraught risk: What kind of meaning remains when we let go of the written word, let textuality sink into this woven texture? How is knowledge reconfigured and revealed when it is threaded into its own discrete and inscrutable field? What are the modalities of reading this inscrutability might yield?
Indeed, planar vessel XVII is an infinity of questions. It does not answer our gaze with the comfort of complete legibility, stability, and solidity. Indeed, meaning is embedded in this field of fugitive materials and veiled language. But this meaning changes, ebbing and flowing like shadows themselves.
Footnotes:
[1] Campbell, J. P. “Time and Change: Colour, Taste and Conservation.” International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, vol. 4, no. 3, 2009, pp. 254–65, https://doi.org/10.2495/DNE-V4-N3-254-265.
[2] Nieuwland, Monique van. “Ikat II: Ikat with Warp, Weft, Double, Compound Weaving, Shifu & Hand & Machine Knitting.” Textile Fibre Forum, vol. 31, no. 1, 2012, pp. 57–57.
[3] Here, we might cite Western philosophical discourses beginning with Plato’s Allgeory of the Cave and through twentieth century traditions of logical positivism.
About:
Kenturah Davis (b. 1984, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist living and working between Los Angeles and Accra, Ghana. Davis earned a BA from Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA and an MFA from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT in 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include Dark Illumination, Oxy Arts, Los Angeles, CA (2023); apropos of air, (a)Float, (a)Fall, (a)Dance, (a)Death, Jeffrey Deitch, New York, NY (2021); Matthew Brown Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Everything that Cannot Be Known, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2020); Blur in the Interest of Precision, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles, CA (2019); among others. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including PRESENT ’23: Building the Scantland Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH (2023, forthcoming); Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2023); From Near and Far, Stephen Friedman, London, UK (2022); Black American Portraits, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Lines of Thought: Kenturah Davis, Mary Kelly and Agnes Martin, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, UK (2020); Language Games, Fullerton College, Fullerton, CA (2020); and Punch, curated by Nina Chanel Abney, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2019); among others. Davis’s work is in the collections of the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, The Bunker ArtSpace, NY, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Studio Museum, New York, NY; among others. Davis is the recipient of the Headlands Residency, Sausalito, CA (2020); the NXTHHVN Artist Fellowship, New Haven, CT (2019); and DAMLI Fellowship, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (2018); among others.
Zoë Hopkins is a writer and critic living in New York, NY. Primarily focused on art of the Black diaspora, her writing has appeared in several exhibition catalogs as well as Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Frieze Magazine, Cultured Magazine, Hyperallergic, and Artsy. She received an A.B. in Art History and African American Studies from Harvard University and will receive an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University.