Solo Show at Matthew Brown

APROPOS OF AIR

new drawings, editions and works in glass

November 13, 2021 - December 18, 2021

Opening Reception November 13, 2021 6PM - 8PM

Matthew Brown

712 N La Brea Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90036

In this new body of work, the artist expands the landscape where language and the figure intersect. The show is framed by two new works in glass: custom stained-glass windows made in collaboration with Judson Studios. A grid of colored light filter into the gallery, intra-acting with the space inside. The color continues into the works on paper, introducing the artist’s experiments with color which integrate writings about conditions that are at the horizon of our understanding (such as the ancient knowledge systems and the physics of color, space and time). As the texts drift in and out of legibility, the figures embody how the perception of ourselves shift so swiftly with every nuanced change in our environment. Nothing exists in isolation, but rather in a contingent relationship with its context. The figures in the stamp drawings echo the phrase The Bodily Effect of a Color, against a ground of pixelated hues. The newest series, planar vessels, bear washes of ink produced using a photographic process where an image is made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface and exposing it to sunlight. They are then embedded with text, leaving a low relief that allow for a dynamic relationship with the blurred figures that are rendered on its surface. Several of these drawings are accompanied with paper thread weavings. The artist begins this process by writing a text on paper, then slices and twists the paper into thread. For these latest weavings, she worked with Kente weaver, Bob Dennis Ahiagble, who wove her threads into a graphic and coded pattern. Together, the portrait and text(tile) embody the ways language flows around and through us in invisible ways. The 2-d plane of the paper and fabric is reconfigured as a vessel, full of meaning, a container of information. For the first time, the artist also presents an arrangement of chine collé photographs that reveal the significant role of photography in her practice. These long-exposure images note the poetics of the durational experience the artist has with her community of friends/sitters.

Apropos of Air Install

Apropos of Air Install

[DETAIL] Planar Vessel I, 2021

Apropos of Air Install

Apropos of Air Install

Apropos of Air Install

Solo Show at Jeffrey Deitch NYC

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“Dance writing” is the literal translation of the Greek word choreography. This is how Kenturah Davis explains her unique approach to her new drawings. Her work fuses language, figuration and performance. She describes her latest series as follows:

This project began with a very open-ended question about how the apparatus of language might function as a kind of choreography for how we exist and move through the world. I initially began with identifying pragmatic ways that language structures our movements. In the way that architecture can guide how one moves through space, or the placement of a handle on a cup suggests how to pick it up, language that constructs the fabric of a given society similarly tries to choreograph our activities. Embedded in this is my interest in thinking about how we, as actors in a society, negotiate that choreography (conforming, resisting and improvising) to pursue freedom. This new work is an effort to consider how language produces conditions of contingency, blurring the personal and the political. Large-scale drawings show figures shifting and drifting against a backdrop of texts embedded in the paper. They suggest that the structures that shape our experience in the world extend from the ways we use language. The implications of this language are activated through our bodies.

Davis’s new series of drawings includes the debates that took place during the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. The transcripts of the Senate debates are impressed into the multiple panels that make up each image. Davis writes that “the amendment itself, in just a few lines, purports a concept of freedom by virtue of abolishing slavery on the condition that one is not a criminal. The debate exemplifies a framework that, on the one hand facilitates freedom, and simultaneously facilitates confinement. This range of outcomes is suggested in the drifting, shifting, and blurring of the figures in the drawings as they intersect the text.” 

While immersed in making the first group of drawings in the series, Davis realized that she needed a counterpoint to consider other philosophical frameworks that might conceive freedom differently. She turned to non-western traditions, highlighting those that developed in Sub-Saharan Africa that counter western binary systems. Her drawings deliver a kaleidoscope of texts that embrace liminal space and the contingent nature of meaning, reconfiguring how we conceive of freedom. 

In this new body of work, I am trying to reconcile presence and possibility. The structures that shape our experience in the world extend from the ways we use language. By acknowledging that language is not immutable but rather generates conditions of contingency, then its current failure to produce abiding freedom does not need to be a permanent condition. It can compose other conditions for us to move through.

Kenturah Davis lives and works between Los Angeles and Accra, Ghana. The artist earned her BA from Occidental College, Los Angeles, and MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2018. Her work was included in Punch, curated by Nina Chanel Abney at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, in 2019. The Savannah College of Art and Design presented Everything That Cannot Be Known, a solo exhibition of her work, in 2020. Public projects include a major commission 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 2021, and Four Women, a commissioned mural by Alliance Francaise to commemorate International Women’s Day, in Accra, Ghana. (a)Float, (a)Fall, (a)Dance, (a)Death is Kenturah Davis’s first solo exhibition in New York. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Matthew Brown, Los Angeles.



New Monograph

New Monograph

Matthew Brown Los Angeles and SCAD University Press proudly present Kenturah Davis: Everything that Cannot be Known, the artist’s debut monograph commemorating her first solo exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art in 2020. Featuring an insightful preface by Diane Von Furstenberg and an oeuvre-defining essay by curator Humberto Moro, the catalog also includes a conversation between Davis and BOMB Magazine’s Stephanie E. Goodalle and poems by Jayy Dodd.

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Lines of Thought: Kenturah Davis, Mary Kelly and Agnes Martin

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is delighted to present Kenturah Davis, Mary Kelly and Agnes Martin in Lines of Thought, an exhibition exploring the poetics and politics of language. Important unseen work by Kelly and new text drawings and weavings by Davis enter into conversation with the hand-drawn lines and gridded compositions of Martin’s works on paper.

 

Lines of Thought is the first UK presentation of work by young LA-based artist, Kenturah Davis. Four works (2020) from her series, Limen, pair portraiture with weaving, expressing how individuals are inseparable from the ideas and language that shape identity. Each portrait takes shape through a meticulous process of rubbing pencil across embossed paper inscribed with handwritten text. As the figure emerges, areas of script become legible, while others remain nearly invisible. Juxtaposed is a textile woven from related handwritten script on paper, transformed into thread using the Japanese technique shifu. Drawing on the etymological link between text and textiles, the fibres hint at their encoded information only through tiny flecks of ink. Davis draws on writings from Africa and its diaspora, including those by scholars Fred Moten and Jedidah Isler, touching on subjects from shadows, to black holes, time travel, proverbs and philosophy. Through concealment and illumination, Davis complicates binary categories of black and white, light and dark, East and West.

 

Exhibited for the first time will be Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document: Documentation VI (Silver Autone Prints) (1983), a unique installation made of 15 parts based on the artist’s artwork of the same name. It was while working on the book version for Post-Partum Document that Kelly devised this rare photographic technique. In Documentation VI, Kelly explores the linguistic formation and development of gender identity, referencing the Rosetta Stone to examine the importance of repetition to the development of language and meaning. Also on view is Kelly’s London, 1974 (2017) in which the artist uses her unique lint medium to integrate personal memories of motherhood and communal living as experienced by feminists in the 1970s. Kelly transposes this private, handwritten correspondence into gridded panels, the materiality of the process reflecting that of Davis’ weavings, and together forming a dialogue on our fragile comprehension of formative events and social structures.

 

Grid-like arrangements echo throughout the exhibition. This is crystallised in Agnes Martin’s drawing The Peach (1964). Delicate graphite lines appear to blaze an unswerving path into the infinite, only to reach an abrupt stop at the outer limits of the grid. Simultaneously constricting and liberating, the grid functions as a tool to approach ambiguous concepts of identity, memory and emotion. The drawings by Martin will be accompanied by works from her only major printing project, On a clear day (1973), inviting the viewer to meditate upon the mutability of structure and the potential of seriality to generate meaning. This body of work marks a critical point in Martin’s career, signalling a return to artmaking after a self-imposed hiatus. By the time of her pencil, ink and watercolour drawing, Untitled (1995), Martin’s grids have been simplified into straight horizontal (sometimes vertical) lines, not unlike those of a school workbook. As Nancy Princenthal has suggested, Martin’s hand drawn lines are directly ‘tied to handwriting and to verbal language … not so much represent[ing] conditions in the material world … as states of mind, or more precisely, lines of thought’.[1]

 

VIEW LINES OF THOUGHT OVR

 

[1] Nancy Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art, Thames and Hudson (2015)

Parallels and Peripheries

PARALLELS AND PERIPHERIES: Fractal and Fragments

Kim Dacres, Kenturah Davis, Basil Kincaid, Nate Lewis, David Shrobe, Kennedy Yanko

 

curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah

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November 11th 2020 - January 30th 2021

Galleria Anna Marra is pleased to present PARALLELS AND PERIPHERIES: Fractals and Fragments curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah. The exhibition is the fourth iteration in a series - the first outside the United States - that investigates how visual artists cultivate their artistic practices by responding to ideas, narratives, myths, and materials, and highlights the works of six African American artists living and working in the United States: sculptures by Kim Dacres and Kennedy Yanko in addition to paintings, works on paper, and photo collages by David Shrobe, Kenturah Davis, Nate Lewis, and Basil Kincaid.

 

PARALLELS AND PERIPHERIES: Fractals and Fragments utilizes the mathematical concept of fractals to deeply explore what is seen on and beneath the surface. The use of this conceptual framework highlights the intricacy and nuances present within the shared history of Black aesthetics and Diasporic community. Moreover, it illustrates that although these artists might have somewhat similar experiences on the surface, upon closer interrogation, all of these artists possess voices and perspectives that are immensely varied and encompass a multiplicity of differences. 

 

PARALLELS AND PERIPHERIES: Fractals and Fragments will provoke a stimulating discourse around the ideas of race, identity, materiality, and memory in a way that is rarely seen in this part of the world. As the capital, Rome is an ideal vantage point to further explore the themes of the series with the goal of leveraging the capacity of artists and artistic dialogue to illuminate the shifts in the power dynamics between the “center” and “periphery.” 

The featured artists explore themes of empathy, culture, environment, and understanding of self and others in the world. The need for a discursive artistic engagement through this exhibition seeks to forefront our shared human experience in a climate that is increasingly urgent with the rise of nationalist, racist, xenophobic. In a time where Italy in particular is struggling to respond to global issues affecting them locally, such as the refugee crisis, the collateral damage associated with COVID-19, and migration to name a few, Fractals and Fragments moves the public to connect with the sense of humanity within one another and themselves. The crux of this exhibition endeavors to study the complexity of these issues from the perspective of African American artists within a rubric that at times is perceived as aesthetically and culturally homogeneous. By highlighting that diversity of thought, points of view and artistic approach from these artists are what makes the African American diaspora unique, PARALLELS AND PERIPHERIES: Fractals and Fragments will present an expanded view of contemporary art and the cultural zeitgeist.

 

The inaugural edition of PARALLELS AND PERIPHERIES took place in Miami Beach at Oolite Arts in the fall of 2018 and presented works by eight women artists whose dynamic practices reframe and redefine how artmaking fits into a broader global discourse impacting marginalized communities. The second edition was exhibited in Detroit at MOCAD in 2019. It focused on the roles that art, technology and science play in the creation of the work of artists. The third iteration of the series, took place at VisArts in Rockville, MD during the Fall of 2019, and sought to explore how emigrant and first-generation immigrant artists are using their work to negotiate issues of migration, mobility, identity, visibility and invisibility in a time of social volatility.

Conversation with Toyin Ojih Odutola

Kenturah Davis speaks with fellow artist, Toyin Ojih Odutola about her work and new exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London. This conversation shares some of their mutual interests, spanning topics from drawing to otherness to shadows. The recording is paired with a slideshow of drawings by both artists. This is for the archives.

Toyin Ojih Odutola:
toyinojihodutola.com/
barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2020/event/toyin-ojih-odutola-a-countervailing-theory