KATES-FERRI PROJECTS is proud to present new interactive works by Damien Davis in his solo exhibition, “Made in America”, on view September 1 through October 5, 2022. With his trademark vibrant colors and reflective surfaces, and some new components, like splashy water wheels, Davis lures audiences into difficult conversations about racism, identity, and US history. Creating his own iconography from Black culture, he explores how Black body agency, intelligence, and financial prosperity connect to the perceived threat to white supremacy. Consequently, this threat becomes grounds for real physical and financial harm to Black Americans today.

Known for coding, decoding, and recoding through signifiers, Davis centers on the toy water gun, especially that of the Super Soaker, and bullet-like nuts and bolts as his motif to discuss gun violence and violence on Black bodies. Young Black boys playing with toy guns, similar to the Soaker, had led to their death by real guns. As recently as July 21, 2022, teenager

Raymond Chaluisant was killed by an off-duty correctional officer in the Bronx while playing with a gel blaster, a toy water gun that shoots gel beads made of water. There was young Tamir Rice, at the tender age of 12, who was shot and killed by a police officer responding to reports of him playing with an airsoft toy gun that shoots plastic pellets in 2014. Davis’s parents knew all too well that this could happen to their son. They sternly kept him away from the toy and from specific clothing, like hoodies, another motif in Davis’s work. This indelible memory tells Davis that a Black boy seeking summer fun, meaning a boy having and experiencing agency and freedom, is perceived as dangerous and that perception leads to death. In his work, Davis places Chaluisant, Rice, and the many Black bodies into the Soaker’s water tanks in his work, like a watery grave that recalls slave hauls coming through the Middle Passage.

Connecting these fatal accounts to the beginnings of the African diaspora in the US, Davis finds water in the shared sad intergenerational trauma of slavery to ongoing harm coming to Black prosperity and innovation. The billion-dollar water toy gun, the Super Soaker (1989), was not an immediate prize for its maker, Lonnie George Johnson. He needed to sue the multi-billion company Hasbro selling his toy for the $73 million in royalties that he was owed. A more devastating example of Black people’s prosperity leading to injustice and tragedy was the 1921 Massacre of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, where a white mob set fire to an affluent African American community, killing 300 and destroying the neighborhood. Johnson’s case suggests that racially motivated prejudicial treatment is still a part of US society.

Davis layers these themes of physical, intellectual, and financial power and vulnerabilities in the Super Soaker motif. In Scope (2022), he replaces the rifle and spear from the iconic image of Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton seated in a high-back rattan chair (1968) with two Soakers. With the kinetic and interactive water splash positioned as a halo behind the central figure, the work playfully ascends and honors Black lives. Every component of Davis’s work deepens and unearths more under-recorded Black history of America.

The people, the inventions, and the internalized ideas are all born in the US. And yet, not all people are not afforded the safety and protection from Mother America. Davis invites discourse on these painful topics, revealing the underlying threat to being Black in America. The work leads to a dialog that

surpasses surface-level niceties into the nitty-gritty unspoken hierarchies that shape behaviors and one’s life based on skin color. Beyond the technical specificity and skill needed to design and construct his work, Davis creates unapologetic and astute iconography that links the tangled histories and current realities into a seamless aesthetic.

Damien Davis: (b. 1984) is a Brooklyn-based artist, born in Crowley, Louisiana and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. His practice explores historical representations of blackness by seeking to unpack the visual language of various cultures and question how these societies code/decode representations of race through craft, design and digital modes of production. His work has appeared at The Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art, as well as METHOD Gallery in Seattle, and Biagiotti Progetto Arte in Italy. He is the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Community Engagement Grant and has been awarded residencies with the Museum of Arts and Design, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Pilchuck Glass School. Mr. Davis is also a former fellow and current advisor for the Art & Law Program in New York City. His work has been mentioned in the New York Times, Frieze Magazine, The Guardian, Hyperallergic and Vulture Magazine.

Artist Statement: Damien Davis explores historical representations of blackness by seeking to unpack the visual language of various cultures and to question how these societies code and decode representations of race. Using digital tools to shape layers of materials both natural and synthetic, Davis composes stories, told through a lexicon of graphic figures and shapes, that oscillate between the personal memories of the artist and chapters of human history. Through usage of materials Davis exploits the seductive and subjective beauty of color and the power of color as a metaphor, Davis creates a deceptively appealing space for confronting bias and dehumanization in contemporary society.

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