duration I (jada), 2024. (animated gif)
tangents (jada - marjani - marcella), 2024, archival pigment print on paper, 20 x 30 inches (unframed), edition of 40
In partnership with The Lapis Press, Kenturah Davis is proud to present two new photographic limited editions. For inquiries please contact The Lapis Press.
Press Release:
Jazz always keeps you on the edge. There is no final chord. There may be a long chord, but no final chord. And it agitates you…There is something underneath that is incomplete.
-Toni Morrison and Nellie McKay. “An Interview with Toni Morrison.” in Contemporary Literature
There's this thing about movement, obviously, yes: the sleight of the hand, of the shadow, slight reflection, some refraction, that place, that face, that knowing. Kenturah Davis is a master of this transition, shifting scope and focus in a single shot, commanding both viewer and subject into an ethereal fourth-dimensional space. With her lenticular print duration I (jada), 2024, and pigment print tangents (jada-marjani-marcella), 2024, Davis extends time through her compulsion to gather at the seams of movement locating a nearly intangible, unbound subject. Akin to jazz’s spontaneity and place on the edge, Davis’s photographs find focus in the instability and chatter that improvisation—be it light, aperture, or matter—offers in each moment. A single subject echos into infinite portals with duration I (jada) while in tangents (jada-marjani-marcella), the three women's bodies and physical space extend into diverging rays of light. Here, intent and chance play within the frame, while also highlighting the precipice of something just beyond the boundaries.
In the above epigraph, Toni Morrison looks to the profound innovation within the unknowing, what she names the underneath, that jazz offers in tone, pace, and illegibility. Davis, an artist committed to the utility/shadow/structure of language as a technology within her broad artistic practice, also finds herself within the realm of jazz’s underneath, blurring and collapsing edges of perception. In these two prints, language is the gesture relaying and creating a looking that is home in the incomplete.
Artist Statement:
The invitation from The Lapis Press to collaborate turned into a fulfilling lesson in walking in the dark…we felt our way through two years of r&d to emerge with two works that recalibrate the act of seeing. They portray the subtle, improvised movements among dancers to highlight the potent possibilities of our quotidian encounters. Creating a body of long exposure photographs that could be integrated into the sophisticated lenticular technology that The Lapis Press has developed proved to be an interesting challenge. Introducing a mirror into the scene of duration I - (jada) extended the experience of space and time as the subject’s gaze shifts across the frame. Ultimately, it delivers the illusive magic of lenticular images with a sense of ephemeral multiplicity.
tangents (jada - marjani - marcella), an archival pigment print on paper, foregrounds an anomaly of lights streaking around three figures. Even as they appear to be in a state of pause, the image proposes that nothing is static and every aspect of our reality is a dynamic orchestration of movement.
This new collaboration with The Lapis Press forms a bridge between photography and my extensive drawing practice. It highlights the significant role photography plays in my efforts to create images and objects that ask for slow looking and thoughtful reflection about how we perceive ourselves in the world. - Kenturah Davis