planar vessel I has been acquired by MOCA and is on view in Old and New Dreams: Recent Acquisitions in a Collection at MOCA Grand through September 11.
Kenturah Davis, planar vessel I, 2021 fugitive ink photogram, hand debosssed text, carbon pencil rubbing on Igarashi kozo paper, artist frame, each (of 5 panels): 59 x 39.25 inches.
From @moca on instagram:
Over the past decade, Los Angeles artist Kenturah Davis has garnered increasing attention for works that explore a hybrid space where language and the figure intersect. Incorporating aspects of drawing, photography, printing, and writing - often in an overlay of processes - her work is as much involved with material craft, including traditional paper-making and weaving, as it is with philosophical meditations on identity and perception.
planar vessel I has a two-dimensional surface that seems to open up and contain a metaphorical volume as one looks into it. The primary motif consists of a pencil-rubbed image of a young Black woman, seen in three different views, fluttering or dancing across the work’s five sheets of paper, which have been mounted side-by-side. The paper has been treated with photosensitive inks and left outside to accumulate ghostly traces of time and weather - stains of pink, pale yellow, and lavender. An overlay of barely-visible cursive handwriting has been dry-pressed across the surface of the entire work, making its rumination on physics and daily experience legible. The overall work conveys a hazy portrayal of a person appearing to flow through time, words, and light. planar vessel I has the musical qualities of a free-jazz improvisation in visual form.
Old and New Dreams: Recent Acquisitions in a Collection highlights acquisitions made over the past two years, situating them in relation to hallmark historical examples from MOCA’s renowned collection. Recently added works by Camille Henrot, Ian Cheng, Essie Bendolph Pettway, and Trulee Hall, among many others, share space with canonical works across four distinct galleries, each oriented towards themes that have been present in MOCA’s Collection from its earliest days. These include figuration, as artist’s have pursued it in various media; representations of technological sentience; the intersection of geometric modernism and self-taught or vernacular art; and occultism in California art. Neither a full picture of MOCA’s recent collecting, nor a survey of its collection as a whole, the groupings are meant as case-studies from a history caught mid-stream.
Old and New Dreams: Recent Acquisitions in a Collection is organized by Bennett Simpson, Senior Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Exhibitions at MOCA are supported by the MOCA Fund for Exhibitions with generous funding provided by Earl and Shirley Greif Foundation and Nathalie Marciano and Julie Miyoshi.