Kenturah Davis: Dark Illumination at OXY ARTS
Kenturah Davis, Dark Illuminations (installation view) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist, Matthew Brown, and OXY ARTS. Photo: Christian Nguyen.
In the silvery frays between light and dark, shadows scratch at illusions of reality. Kenturah Davis' practice is often situated in obscure and shadowy spaces such as these, in twilight zones that evade omniscient thinking, turning our flimsy blueprint constructions of perception into slippery jello. Davis makes us sensitive to the emergent vibrations that echo in the pit of a shadow, in the shadow beneath another shadow's shadow, rippling and cascading outward and falling back in on itself. Davis' solo exhibition, dark illumination–realized over the course of her residency at OXY ARTS—presents a body of work that expands upon the artist's ongoing ontological inquiry into the boundaries of perception, considering the dualistic forces embedded in language and representation that condition our sense of self and reality. Davis continually challenges the hierarchies of knowledge that scaffold perception.
Inspired by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows, Davis considers the emergent potential of shadows and the situated and relational environments that underpin ontologies of light and dark, shaped by particularities of identity, culture, and history. Tanizaki's imaginative and spiritual relationship to shadows stems from "realities of life, our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately guide shadows towards beauty's end." (1)
A blanket of low light saturates the gallery’s umber-colored walls. My eyes adjust, and my body softens as the warm light nudges my senses to proceed with intimacy and care, as one might in a sacred, spiritual space. The words "DARK ILLUMINATION" appear to levitate on the surface of the wall that splices the room in two. Davis plays with the illusionary potential of the shadow, pointing to its capacity to bend perception. Shadows are slippery tricksters that seduce and shapeshift, appealing to both fear and desire, elusive yet grounded in reality. They are veils that also reveal. This kind of mind-bending thought is expected in every one of my encounters with Davis’s work. It provokes a kind of existential, magical thinking that excites me in a profound way, shuttering the foundations of the large and small stories that animate my world.
Nestled into the wall that bisects the gallery are a series of incised shelves that house various ceramic vessels. The monochromatic scheme of the room and objects make the space feel like a deprivation chamber that sharpens my vision. Resting on one of the shelves is an arrangement of palm and eucalyptus leaves. Each sprig casts an elegant and fleeting shadow that yearns to exceed the bounds of its cubby. A curved doorway in the center of the wall exposes a glimpse of the installation on the other side; like a luring portal, it ushers me through. The large-scale work titled planar vessel XV (2023) is made of 168 ceramic tiles that form a jagged surface spanning 15 feet wide, depicting one woman in four different states. Her neck oscillates as she extends her body–gyrating, glitching, splitting, splintering, dancing–across the room. Furrowed overlapping words debossed into the ceramic surface give the figure definition; each puncture and indentation is made visible by the reminisce of dark charcoal pigment that remains at the surface. Excerpts of text by Fred Moton, Toni Morrison, and Carlo Rovell move in and out of legibility, their whispered words animating the contours of her face and body. The ceramic tiles wobble and shift as if to suggest they are capable of change. The grid composition also evokes a kind of sacred geometry and Tanizaki's belief that beauty exists "in the patterns of the shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates." (2)
Kenturah Davis, Dark Illuminations (installation view) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist, Matthew Brown, and OXY ARTS.
Kenturah Davis, planar vessel XV (2023). Debased text and carbon pencil on ceramic tile. 50.75 x 174 inches. Image courtesy of the artist, Matthew Brown, and OXY ARTS. Photo: Christian Nguyen.
In a brighter room, two portraits are installed on white walls. Comprised of twelve ceramic tiles, planar vessel XVI (2023) depicts a woman rendered in charcoal that sinks into and emerges from the debossed tiles. Her direct and seemingly coded gaze prompts our attention. The adjacent portrait, titled in praise of shadows (2019), depicts a woman gazing upward, her body slightly turned away to reveal the profile of her face. Her eyes are transfixed by a mysterious unseen force above. The figure is defined by an innumerable accumulation of markings and smudges made with rubber stamp letters, resulting in a much darker image.
Kenturah Davis, planar vessel XVI (detail) (2023). Debased text and carbon pencil on ceramic tile, 21.75 x 29 inches. Image courtesy of the artist, Matthew Brown, and OXY ARTS. Photo: Christian Nguyen.
My feastful, contemplative gaze gets lost in the warm light, the words, and the textural intricacies of Davis’ surfaces. I find myself returning to a moon jar installed in the other room. As I admire its stuccoey crusted surface a second time, I contemplate the idea of Davis' portraits as moons, each figure represented in a different phase of dark illumination; the woman's direct gaze mimics that of a full moon, and in the woman’s upward turned gaze echos the slivery profile of a waxing crescent. The moon's four principal phases: the new moon, first quarter moon, full moon, and last quarter moon, appear in the composition and choreography of the woman’s quartetted body, branching out while maintaining her core, her gravitational center.
Sometimes, I think of my own shadow as a moon—a tether, a mortal coil, a looming reminder of my corporeal existence. My "shadow moon" follows me around with the centrifugal force of a planet in orbit, evidence of my aliveness, or what Dante calls L'ombra della carne (the shadow of the flesh). I relate to the moon in that I, too, can never fully be known or understood; part of myself will always be in the shadows—a mercurial, slithering shapeshifter. Davis' mediations aren't simply concerned with empty voids but rather, in the dark pools of emergence, undulating with selves yet to be born. Shadows teach us (and often require us to unlearn) how to embrace the unknown, the dark side of the moon, and the boundless mysteries of our existence.
More questions arise around the moon jar. Davis' overarching interest in linguistics and the limitations of language led me to re-think the moon's cratered surface as a kind of ancient mark-making, like cosmic glyphs. The lunar surface looks the same as it did nearly 4.5 billion years ago—the same moon that graced the skies of the woolly mammoths, the Egyptians, and the ancient microbes. Its silent gaze seems to communicate something sacred, akin to Octavia Butler's description of Mars, "a rock—cold, empty, almost airless, dead. Yet it's heaven in a way. We can see it in the night sky, a whole other world." Early modes of communication were informed, in part, by the phenomenon of the moon and night sky. The moon reminds us of what Ana Mendieta calls ancestral sap–-the cosmic drippings that bind us to the past and to each other.
Kenturah Davis asks us to think deeply about the shadowy spaces that permeate our interior and exterior worlds, leading us to discover dark illuminations within ourselves that bend the boundaries of perception. She invites us into the shade of the twilight where darkness spans the cosmos, glimmering and burgeoning with unbound potential.
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(1) Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō. In Praise of Shadows, (1933) 30.
(2) Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō. In Praise of Shadows, (1933) 15.
Kenturah Davis, In Praise of Shadows (2019), Oil paint applied with rubber stamp letters on chine-colle with color ground, on paper, 29 x 20 inches. Image courtesy of the artist, Matthew Brown, and OXY ARTS. Photo: Christian Nguyen.