Until the Sun Goes Dark, July 15 – September 28, 2024, SEPTEMBER
“Davis takes 2000 year old quotes from the Old Testament--harsh, complicated sentences about power and evil, about violence and hatred--and then recasts them in the overall shape and pattern of the American flag. She makes each letter by attaching a brush to a 3 foot long dowel, meaning that the degree of difficulty in drawing/painting/writing each letter is extraordinarily high. The negative space between the letters takes on its own jagged intensity. The act of reading becomes almost excruciating. Comprehension falters. There are sculptures as well, each of which points to the entangled ideas of time, rage, enclosure, perfection, collapse, contingency, and terror. If you are in the Hudson Valley do not miss this show. Davis is trying to get at the taproot (rather than the epiphenomena) of the violence we are made of/surrounded by. It's the only show I've seen that relentlessly stayed with how difficult it is to think and feel our way through this moment. In other words, the show made me feel like I wasn't insane. Rather, it made me aware--even if the awareness was prickly and painful--that the long duree of human history is sticky and recursive, filled with gaps and fissures; its complications are legion. This is a show that will make you question the easy glide of your thumb over a piece of gorilla glass. It's a body of work that won't let one forget that gratitude and rage are a form of warp and weft. This is a show hell bent on jamming the signal. This show will slow you right the fuck down--indeed I had the distinct feeling of downshifting from 4th to 2nd gear (the words lurch and grind came to mind). The difficulty of the work felt like a form of homeopathy, a bitter herb distilled so as to be more easily absorbed in the bloodstream; it might not taste good but it will, slowly and with great effort, help you think and feel more clearly.”
— Helen Molesworth
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