Hernease Davis

ARTIST STATEMENT

“…new love.” is a series of self-portrait cyanotypes on canvas, silk and linen. Cyanotype is a UV-activated photo process, and I lied down in the sun to begin these pieces. I have selectively developed them, marking the fabrics with instinctive gestures that turn the fabrics from a greenish yellow to shades of royal blue. The portions of the fabric that I don’t mark will shift colors over a long period of time, eventually to a very dark blue. The silks and linens are semi-translucent, letting in some light. I have arranged them in a round and each piece is connected to the ceiling by crochet stitches that I either improvised to make very long chains or followed a pattern to make shell-like shapes. Installed into the ceiling above the middle of the round an audio installation is playing Hums in Keys of C, where I am layering my voice in acapella to make musical chords that transition around C. I have layered cyanotype marks on the walls surrounding this installation. These gestures will continue to shift in color for the duration of this exhibition.

ABOUT THIS PAGE

This webpage provides both images and description to render a virtual experience of each artist’s work. Below is an image gallery that includes installation shots and details of Hernease Davis’s installation. In-depth written descriptions that provide visual, auditory, contextual, and other sensory information are available below the image gallery. Audio recordings of this material are available through the SoundCloud embedded above.

IMAGE GALLERY & DESCRIPTIONS

From the series, "...new love," 2020, cyanotype on canvas, linen and silk, felted wool, crochet, audio, 6’ diameter, 9.5’ height

Tucked around the corner to the left of the title wall is a small alcove. In the alcove there is a hanging arrangement of draped fabrics, forming a kind of enclosure. Some of the fabrics reach the floor, others are high enough that someone could crawl under. Each piece of fabric is a deep blue cyanotype with overlapping strokes of dark and light blue and streaks of white from top to bottom. Each draped sheet of fabric forms an abstract image that resembles a series of deeply knotted veins, like rivers passing over, in and out of each other. Two gallery walls flank the hanging fabrics; these walls are painted with a thicket of grayish black brush strokes that both overlap in grassy knots. The paint appears to have dripped and runs the length of the wall in traces of black. 

Moving around the hanging fabric, there is an opening which allows the audience to stand inside and be enclosed by the draped linen and silk on three sides. Inside, the imagery is undoubtedly watery, but the material is airy. The fabrics are an even deeper midnight blue on these sides, some of which are opaque, others semi-transparent. The light coming through the translucent fabric looks like moonlight reflected on water. Some of the shapes formed by the lighter blue and white on these sheets look almost patterned; others look as if they arrived in this form by chance, not unlike the shapes rivers forge through land. The fabrics are hung from loosely knotted crocheted roping that overlaps and criss-crosses in patterns both supporting the pieces of fabric suspended from the ceiling and intertwining with each other.  

Attached to the ceiling in the center of the enclosure is a sound cone that plays an audio piece. After a deep breath, a voice hums a single tone stretched out, layering different recordings of the same voice into a growing chorus. The tone is thick and sonorous, resonant not only in the throat of the performer, which in the many layers of the tone being sung creates a phasing effect that seems to glow beyond the body of any one voice, but also haunt and reverberate in the bodies of the audience, maybe somewhere in the chest or along the spine. The layers of voices collide and gather and grow and swell, combining; the space seems to get bigger with the sound before ultimately releasing and dissolving back into differentiated voices; the space adjusts back to its original size but different now; awash in the tone, which continues to swell and release on loop.

ARTIST BIO

Hernease Davis is a photo-based artist using photograms, cyanotypes, sound, performance and craft to emphasize self-care through the artistic process. Hernease is on faculty at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY and has served as a Visiting Lecturer at ICP-Bard where she led a course exploring empathy through art practice. She has shown her work throughout the U.S. and a photogram from her current series, A Womb of My Own (Mistakes Were Made in Development), is now on view at Transformer Station as a part of the current exhibition, One. As a part of the EFA SHIFT Residency exhibition, Hernease is showing works that she has been developing throughout the past year from a new series entitled, “… new love.”