resonant frequencies, blossoming tones by Sonia Louise Davis (CRF 2019) opened at HESSE FLATOW last week and will be up until October 1st. Marking Davis’ first solo presentation with the gallery, the exhibition premieres a new body of large-scale, immersive work from her emergence series that the artist calls “soft paintings.”
“Throughout her multi-disciplinary practice, Davis includes elements of painting, voice, and craft. For these paintings, she explores how a radical sonic framework for improvisation can inform an embodied practice for object-making. Using industrial tufting machines as drawing instruments, Davis creates abstract, richly-hued compositions with yarns that are threaded together for their ability to make new tones and textures. Filled with blossoming shag piles and soft curling loops, Davis’s paintings put forth a voluminous cacophony of geometric and organic shapes, coupled with gestural strokes. Invoking the vocabularies of sight, sound, and movement, Davis pushes the formal potential of yarn and the materiality of painting alike.
Each painting progresses through an instinctual process of listening and response—a practice stemming from the artist’s vocal and gestural training in improvisation. The speed of the tufting machine informs spontaneous changes in movement, color, material, and technique. Davis treats the surface as the visual site of experimentation, where forms unfold simultaneously across the frame, manifesting the condition of emergence. The resulting compositions are complex intuitive arrangements of intensity, tonality, and melody—what Davis describes as focus that emerges within the din. Because Davis stands and works on each piece from behind, they are filled with moments of discovery. The resulting forms and what the viewer sees are the textural reliefs of her moves—a non-linear record of their making.
Through sensations of texture, sound, and sight, the softness of Davis’s paintings when in chorus with craft and song suggest an expanded potential of form and their abilities to hold memories and emotions. Works such as sundance, in homage to Jeanne Lee, and sweet earth flying—named after Marion Brown’s album of the same name—gesture towards avant-garde traditions of Black musicians who pushed limits of their forms as liberatory praxis. The emotional and energetic compositions in the emergence series insist on abstraction’s ability to resist overdetermination, the political and formal entanglement of Black musical improvisation, and the relational arrangement of the ensemble.” Learn more here.
-Kristin Juarez, PhD.