"Kill Hate" by Jeremy Davison

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"I am that child of always…"

~ Reinaldo Arenas

 

Sidling the brave gulf of past and presence, Jeremy Davison posits an oblique slab of granite to tempt a reclining void encapsulated as a rectangular glass case. The void holds a humanoid construct atop a base raised with layers. Wiggly, grey snake-like wandering festoons, undulates while it bolsters unsteadiness over lighter colored, rocky pustules. The unseen churns. Above, faceless, the uncomfortable nascent head is crowned with a testament to engendering, a funnel for the release of wiry ideas, sharp, bent sensations, a salient proclamation of contorted perseverance. Its crowning spouts victory through emanation despite the weighty bearing of writhing tolerance.

 

Forbearance, in the guise of a photograph, is saddled with a dark chrysalis emitting pins, guarded, protected through its transits against its history.

 

Davison’s homage to Rauschenberg’s combines notwithstanding, inspiration by Ivana Bašić’s anthropomorphic breaths, Túlio Pinto’s embrace of tottering existence, Marc Horowitz’s quirky pairing speaks within his work as kindred clout.

   

"Structuralism, or at least which is grouped under this slightly too general name, is the effort to establish, between elements that could have been connected on a temporal axis, an ensemble of relations that makes them appear as juxtaposed, set off against one another, implicated by each other—that makes them appear, in short, as a sort of configuration. Actually, structuralism does not entail denial of time; it does involve a certain manner of dealing with what we call time and what we call history."

~ Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.

 

Michel Foucault’s deliberation about the temporal connection is in concert with Davison’s installation. His ensemble of relations configure deals with the history of the process of changes. The scope of his structure establishes relational queries, interpersonal and interactive qualities that are urgent, their need to transform is a quality of its prescience, its timeliness on the brink of transformation.

Heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.

The third principle of heterotopia with its fourth principle “heterochronies” also described by Foucault in Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias is an equally fitting descriptor for Davison’s work. His work reveals the cohesion of incompatibility, how it willingly encompasses all processes, emotive instances in one place at one time is a concise retrieval of history, the present and the future held in abeyance of our processing of how change occurs in our presence, for as long as the work exists, a temporal motivation.

 

"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see."

~ Rene Magritte

 

Because Davison makes the incongruency of contemplative space for change’s projection, we are drawn even more to the anonymity of the figurative aspect of the work. Because, we relate to the humanity of its significance, because we are humans in crisis, living in a planetary crisis. Unlike Foucault’s first principle of crisis heterotopia, our current crisis is universal and not restricted to the phenomenology of aging, illness, or crime per se. Ours is the equivocal crisis that occurs through our segregation from what is humane, how we treat each other, and our planet.

 

A shoe heel shape fixed in its mouth, silenced, Davison’s head’s earpiece is an ambiguous metal part from some machinery, reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) or a Futurist / Boccioni sculpture. This head, especially, echoes Carlo Carrà’s “La musa metafisica” (1917), a faceless muse standing in front of a multicolored cone. Davison’s head wears a truncated multicolored layering piled above a steel canister, which, with deference to Democritus, relates to Davison’s cylinder, conjectures that breach and connects the past to the present. His figurative anonymity, like Carrà’s, brings the sense of universality as a metaphysical experience of the unknown.

 

"The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown."

~ Rene Magritte

 

"Time is the most unknown of all unknown things."
~ Aristotle

 

Davison’s neck ring of darkness is time’s circular nature. It resonances our unknowing. Time endures restlessly and the silence of anonymity speaks of discordant coherence through his work. He asserts his own voice, integrates the discordant with ardency, fortifies characteristics of endurance which translates to the rise of “always”.

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Review by Debora Allana, 2019 ©