Review

A review of Ian Davis: Faith in the Future

Ian Davis, "Announcement," acrylic on canvas, 50" x 54", 2007. Laura and Jeff Schaffer Family Collection, Summit, New Jersey. Image: courtesy of the museum; all images are from the exhibition "Ian Davis: Faith in the Future," on view February 26 through June 19, 2010, at Kemper at the Crossroads.

Kemper at the Crossroads
Kansas City, Missouri
February 26 ‚ June 19, 2010

Larger paintings featured in Ian Davis’s exhibition, Faith in the Future, teem with passive, look-alike men. Scads of dashed-down slim, white men in same clothing congregate civilly or assemble, dismayed, in numbers. In cases, they seem to bear witness or dumbfounded scrutiny; none act.

Welcoming us into the Kemper at the Crossroads is Announcement. In it, 188 men garbed in business suit “uniforms” gather outside a grand Italianate building and gaze toward the second floor balcony. There, a single set of glass doors is thrown open with crimson curtains drawn back; numerous mic’s have been set up in preparation for some kind of address, their orange cords wound round the rail and trailing down through the crowd, underfoot… what state of affairs leaves the address-giver’s lofty perch without electric? Access to the first-floor arcaded gallery is denied by barriers like those used to secure city storefronts in off hours… what set-up crew moves between the zones of the insiders and outsiders?

Davis paints his masses by rote; he says, “Depending on the formation, it is easiest to put down their feet, then shadows, bodies, hands, and other details.” However the gradual shift in perspective from left to right with these men’s silhouettes provides some subtle delight. Under close inspection, it is apparent that, post-painting, the artist has added in fine details with a pen, head after head. Use of paint with pen and suggestion of a social critic’s point of view lets us draw a comparison to Shahn, while the arcaded building and quiet strangeness of the setting summon up de Chirico, too — minus the drama of strong Italian light.

Ian Davis, "Excavation," acrylic on canvas, 60" x 70 1/2", 2008. Collection Dr. and Mrs. Stephen P. Chevalier, Madison, Mississippi. Image: courtesy of the museum

Excavation, with its persuasive landmass and gaping dig lit by long, late afternoon sun, is the handsomest of the paintings on display. Men regard the excavation with light beams shining from their white helmets onto the craft. Every one has his hands in his lab coat pockets. Many more men in white stand outside a chain link fence on the perimeter of the site and look on. A shiny, red crane appears as if poised to hoist one vast, half-buried ark at the center of the composition. This crane of Davis's looks like a toy model. For comparison, a 100-ton crane pulled the wreck and cargo of the Steamboat Arabia from what was once the Missouri River’s bed 45 feet beneath a Kansas farm about two decades years back.

Reports have it that Davis likens Excavation to the birthing of his son; however, this statement is fairly inconsistent with others about his work conveying a wary view of politics and quavering optimism for the world’s future. It compares to Robyn O’Neil revealing her bra (as she was wearing it) to Howard Stern and crew — the goal seems to be to get attention.*

Ian Davis, "Comeuppance," acrylic on canvas, 60" x 65", 2009. Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum Purchase made possible by a gift from the William T. Kemper Charitable Trust, UMB Bank, n.a., Trustee, T2009.3. Image: courtesy of the museum

Like Davis’s roughly five-foot-square Comeuppance on view in Faith in the Future, O’Neal’s six-and-a-half- by 13-foot graphite drawing, Masses and masses rove a darkened pool; never is there laughter… is among the works in the permanent collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. They both show a flooded world peopled with men; O’Neil’s characters’ uniform is a dark sweatsuit with pants elasticized at the ankle. Do these tableaux forecast what is in store for manhood or mankind? Are they silent, laboriously wrought cries for an antidote, mytho-poetic or otherwise, lest we meet with bleak futures pictured?

Where are all the women? Females inhabit the drawings by Amy Cutler, who shows with Leslie Tonkonow, like Davis. There are also the lady goatherds with heads of hair longer than Crystal Gayle’s in Mika Rottenberg’s Cheese — which happens to have been filmed the same year the Kemper’s O’Neil was drawn.

In a recent Kemper ARTcast (a collaboration between KCUR 89.3 FM and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art), curator Barbara O'Brien talked to artist Ian Davis about the work in this exhibition. She explained that seeing museum-goers gathered around Davis’s 2009 acrylic painting, Comeuppance, led her to pursue giving the artist his first solo museum show. Davis’s work was acquired the same year he painted it, and O’Brien, still quite new to her post, paid him a visit in New York to plan his show last November.

Kansas City favors Davis. Crude Oil Sea, a 2006 work on paper that forecasts the likes of the current Gulf Coast disaster, references a similar piece in the collection of the nearby Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. These unpeopled compositions show a shadowy, Piranesi-esque handling of structures and seem to belong to an earlier body of work. Hung near Crude Oil Sea are two paintings loaned to the Kemper exhibition by Kansas City area collectors wherein we see a palette and painterly vocabulary akin to the bulk of the work on view, early strides toward Davis’s current body of work.

Ian Davis, "Monument," acrylic on linen, 60 x 65", 2009. Marc and Livia Straus Family Collection, New York. Image: courtesy of the museum

Note:

* See Geoff Edgers, "Howard Stern, The Artist, An Interview," The Boston Globe, 7 February, 2008, http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/exhibitionist/2008/02/howard_stern_th.html .

-re-

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