(a)Float, (a)Fall, (a)Dance, (a)Death

MAY 8 – JUNE 19, 2021

18 WOOSTER STREET, NEW YORK

“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.

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FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION, CONTACT ALIA WILLIAMS AT (212) 343-7300, ALIA@DEITCH.COM

Some of my paintings and photos documenting the opening of Kenturah’s show.

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