Damien Davis | Weightless

About

Mae Jemison, the first Black woman to travel into space, brought a collection of objects to accompany her on the 8-day voyage beyond the earth’s atmosphere. Among them were a certificate for Chicago public school students celebrating accomplishments in math and science, a Bundu carving from Sierra Leone, a banner for the first Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, and a poster of dancer Judith Jamison in Alvin Ailey’s signature solo Cry, which the choreographer dedicated to “all Black women everywhere–especially our mothers.”1 In the dance, a performer wields a white cloth used at one moment for cleaning, and at another, as a head wrap, and as a gown; a vessel pregnant with struggle, triumph, and joy. Jemison’s companion artifacts were selected to fill-in the gaps of who and what had never before been in outer space, and together form a map reclaiming links and stretching time.

Since 2014, Damien Davis has built his own lexicon of, as the artist describes, “the visual language of historical representations, focused primarily on people, places, and things marked as ‘Black’” to question how cultures “code, decode, and recode representations of race.” This vocabulary also embodies aspects of what art historian Cheryl Finley describes as the “symbolic possession of the past” by contemporary African diaspora and African American artists who reclaim emblems of the past in order to understand their connection to the present.2 Across Davis’s work, the meaning of icons shift as imagery accumulates and associations form, conjuring historical narratives while inviting speculation on alternate purposes and futures. Chains recall the violence of the transatlantic slave trade, while offering their strength to hold new assemblages up. Cowries scatter as currency traded, hidden, or lost, while giving a skeptical side-eye, for we will never know the full story of their travels. Initially produced as vector files which are then output to a laser-cutter, each element in Davis’s work is infinitely repeatable, up for recombination, and stored in memory, safeguarding their reproduction and assuring their continued presence. Industrial hardware sutures these fragments together, yet each joint can be tightened and taken apart using only one’s hands.

In new works produced for Weightless, Jemison’s spaceship and other forms add to Davis’s symbology, expanding his investigation into past and present up to the stars and out to a future where Black life persists and thrives. Here, we find Jemison’s orange flight suit collaged atop Huey P. Newton’s rattan throne. Her space helmet converges with a Zulu isicholo hat forming an Afrofuturist crown. Glittering inlays echo the shine of Chicago’s lights at night that caught Jemison’s eye from space. Teeth, a long-standing element of Davis’s lexicon, remind us of how they were used to assign value to bodies, but now, we also recall Jemison’s research: her work on board the spaceship Endeavor included the study of bone cells. Trained in biofeedback, another of Jemison’s tasks was to research how to maintain one’s body suspended, without gravity, in weightlessness. How would the body react, and what would our psyche do when we achieved this state?

At the close of Herbert Marcuse’s Essay on Liberation, the philosopher asks how can we envision liberation when our imagination for political and social solidarities is so repressed, when we are so weighed down? Or, as he wrote, “What are the people in a free society going to do?” In searching for an answer, he quotes a “young [B]lack girl” who replied, “for the first time in our life, we shall be free to think about what we are going to do.”3  This speaker was plausibly abolitionist scholar Angela Y. Davis. As art historian Sandrine Canac writes in her recovery of Angela Davis’s presence, this reply acknowledges our limited capacity to see and to articulate liberation without first taking on the political work of securing liberation for all. It also gestures towards a broader horizon, to a site somewhere beyond the boundary of our atmosphere, towards new constellations of liberation, solidarity, and a future teeming with life, where, for the first time, we will be free to see and speak the future we want–where we will be weightless.

-Lauren van Haaften-Schick

Damien Davis holds a BFA in Studio Art and an MA in Visual Arts Administration from New York University. He is the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Community Engagement Grant and has been awarded residencies with Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, WA, Triangle Arts Association, Brooklyn, the Museum of Arts and Design, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, New York, NY and most recently with Dieu Donné Paper Mill, Brooklyn, NY.  He is also a former fellow and current advisor for the Art & Law Program in New York.  His works have appeared at The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include Untitled, Miami Beach, FL, Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art & Storytelling, New York, Weeksville Heritage Center, Brooklyn, Mrs., Maspeth, NY and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.  Davis is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Purchase College (SUNY).  The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.