today i am thrilled to (finally) announce my solo show “resonant frequencies, blossoming tones,” opening september 1 @hesse_flatow ✨ can’t wait to share these soft paintings with you all! [first image - a selfie of me in my bronx studio with a sneak peek of one of the newest works; second image - “emergence: sweet earth flying, “ 2022, Norwegian raw wool, hand- spun dyed wool, cotton and acrylic yarns, 46 x 50 x 2 in (116.8 x 127 x 5.1 cm); third and fourth images - screen shots from the press release, full text below] // “resonant frequencies, blossoming tones” premiers a new body of large-scale, immersive work from Davis's emergence series that the artist calls “soft paintings.” For these paintings, Davis 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. Invoking the vocabularies of sight, sound, and movement, Davis pushes the formal potential of yarn and the materiality of painting alike. 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. - Kristin Juarez