Until The Sun Goes Dark
SEPTEMBER Gallery is pleased to present Until the Sun Goes Dark, Taylor Davis’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and her fourth show presented by Kristen Dodge. The exhibition includes sculpture, painting, and works on paper.
Until the sun goes dark, and the light the moon and the stars, and the clouds return after the rain. On the day that the guards of the house shall quake and the strong men stagger, and the grinders grow idle, for they are now few, and those who look from the casements go dark. And the double doors close in the market as the sound of the mill sinks down, and the sound of the bird arises, and all the daughters of song are brought low. And they shall fear high things, and terror is on the road. (Ecclesiastes, Qohelet, 12:2)
edited from texts from:
The Vulgate Bible, Volume III, Douay-Rheims translation
The Wisdom Books, Robert Alter
The New Oxford Annotated Bible
Davis works concurrently on many different forms, all of which are made according to systems of chance and logic, imposed both from within (beetle-holed wood, for example) and without (the artist’s precise hand). The works in the show are built of multiple parts, whether found images, texts, boards milled from rough lumber, or rectilinear patterns of red, green, black, and white paint.
Material properties direct decisions of structure as well as the conceptual frameworks for form, construction, shape, color, and subject. All Davis’s forms are the outcome of a commitment to interdependence, each part and system determining and determined by the other, necessarily responsive.
A constellation of questions arises. An intensive inquiry stacks up, but doesn’t sum up; how do we understand and contend with our time? How can we respond to the unceasing violence we witness from near and afar? The presence of 2000 year old scripture – from the Psalms, Job, and Ecclesiastes – woven into Davis’s work is not a refuge; it’s an attempt to reckon with our past and present humanity, and inhumanity.
Taylor Davis (b. 1959 in Palm Springs, CA) is a visual artist living in Boston. She was recently the ICA Boston’s inaugural artist curator of Invisible Ground of Sympathy, a permanent collection exhibition. She has exhibited widely, including, most recently, Synonyms for Sorrow, Charim Schliefmühlgasse, Vienna; FEEDBACK, The School, Kinderhook, NY; Keep Your Hands Where I Can See ‘Em, A.D., New York, NY; Less Is A Bore: Maximalist Art & Design, ICA Boston; and One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, MOCA, Los Angeles. A solo exhibition, If you steal a horse, and let him go, he’ll take you to the barn you stole him from was part of Aldrich Museum’s 50th anniversary. REDGREEENBACKWHITE was September Gallery’s (Hudson, NY) inaugural exhibition. Her work has been included in numerous museum exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial.
In 2018, a monograph of Davis’s work was published by Arbor Press. Taylor Davis: Selected Work 1996–2018, designed by Purtill Family Business, surveys eighty works with contributing texts by Anselm Berrigan, Michael Brenson, A.K. Burns, Dan Byers, Ruth Erickson, Rochelle Goldberg, Fanny Howe, Richard Klein, Ann Lauterbach, Catherine Lord, Helen Molesworth, Ulrike Müller, Jenelle Porter, Conny Purtill, Lucy Raven, Leslie Scalapino, Nancy Shaver, Oliver Strand, and David Levi Strauss.
Honors include a Rauschenberg Residency, the Radcliffe Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and the ICA Foster Prize. Davis is a longtime professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and served as co-chair and faculty at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College since 2003.
Until the sun goes dark, and the light the moon and the stars, and the clouds return after the rain. On the day that the guards of the house shall quake and the strong men stagger, and the grinders grow idle, for they are now few, and those who look from the casements go dark. And the double doors close in the market as the sound of the mill sinks down, and the sound of the bird arises, and all the daughters of song are brought low. And they shall fear high things, and terror is on the road. (Ecclesiastes, Qohelet, 12:2)
edited from texts from:
The Vulgate Bible, Volume III, Douay-Rheims translation
The Wisdom Books, Robert Alter
The New Oxford Annotated Bible
Davis works concurrently on many different forms, all of which are made according to systems of chance and logic, imposed both from within (beetle-holed wood, for example) and without (the artist’s precise hand). The works in the show are built of multiple parts, whether found images, texts, boards milled from rough lumber, or rectilinear patterns of red, green, black, and white paint.
Material properties direct decisions of structure as well as the conceptual frameworks for form, construction, shape, color, and subject. All Davis’s forms are the outcome of a commitment to interdependence, each part and system determining and determined by the other, necessarily responsive.
A constellation of questions arises. An intensive inquiry stacks up, but doesn’t sum up; how do we understand and contend with our time? How can we respond to the unceasing violence we witness from near and afar? The presence of 2000 year old scripture – from the Psalms, Job, and Ecclesiastes – woven into Davis’s work is not a refuge; it’s an attempt to reckon with our past and present humanity, and inhumanity.
Taylor Davis (b. 1959 in Palm Springs, CA) is a visual artist living in Boston. She was recently the ICA Boston’s inaugural artist curator of Invisible Ground of Sympathy, a permanent collection exhibition. She has exhibited widely, including, most recently, Synonyms for Sorrow, Charim Schliefmühlgasse, Vienna; FEEDBACK, The School, Kinderhook, NY; Keep Your Hands Where I Can See ‘Em, A.D., New York, NY; Less Is A Bore: Maximalist Art & Design, ICA Boston; and One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, MOCA, Los Angeles. A solo exhibition, If you steal a horse, and let him go, he’ll take you to the barn you stole him from was part of Aldrich Museum’s 50th anniversary. REDGREEENBACKWHITE was September Gallery’s (Hudson, NY) inaugural exhibition. Her work has been included in numerous museum exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial.
In 2018, a monograph of Davis’s work was published by Arbor Press. Taylor Davis: Selected Work 1996–2018, designed by Purtill Family Business, surveys eighty works with contributing texts by Anselm Berrigan, Michael Brenson, A.K. Burns, Dan Byers, Ruth Erickson, Rochelle Goldberg, Fanny Howe, Richard Klein, Ann Lauterbach, Catherine Lord, Helen Molesworth, Ulrike Müller, Jenelle Porter, Conny Purtill, Lucy Raven, Leslie Scalapino, Nancy Shaver, Oliver Strand, and David Levi Strauss.
Honors include a Rauschenberg Residency, the Radcliffe Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and the ICA Foster Prize. Davis is a longtime professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and served as co-chair and faculty at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College since 2003.
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SEPTEMBER