When morality is lost, there is ritual. Ritual is the husk of true faith,
the beginning of chaos.
–Tao Te Ching
Ian Davisʼs fourth solo exhibition at the gallery will feature eleven paintings of various sizes created during the past two years. In his newest works, Davis continues to produce an existentialist theater of images in which groups of identically dressed male figures appear in enigmatic dramas suffused with angst, anticipation, and underlying humor.
The exhibition title, inspired by a quotation in the Tao Te Ching, provides a clue to the mysterious activities presented in scenes that may be political reflections, autobiographical revelations, or both.
A now familiar cast of uniformed “oligarchs, imposters, subversives, scientists, soldiers, journalists, and various types of frauds and charlatans” returns in depictions of passive torpidity and futile protest. In Current Events (2014), men in blue jump suits bearing U.S. flag arm patches congregate in an ice cave deep below the earth.
Sitting and standing around stacked video monitors, they intently watch the vertical bars of the gray scale, a situation described by the artist as a study on the numbing effect of information overload. Projector (2014) features an image of the moon projected onto the facade of a nondescript white brick office building. “Scientists or experts” in white lab coats occupy the street, sitting in protest. The painting was inspired by what the Huffington Post called “the Nationʼs Most Boneheaded Art Controversy” when in 2011, the governor of Maine removed a federally funded mural from the Stateʼs Labor Department building. Davis was impressed by the ensuing protest when three other artists projected an image of the mural, which depicted scenes from Labor history, on to the outside of the state capital building. Davisʼs own painting portrays a similar act however, according to the artist, the protesters have become hypnotized as their message is overpowered by the medium. In other works on view industrial buildings are in flames and police cars burn in a smoky inferno, politicians meet press agents, and Tea Party members drive pickup trucks to and from nowhere on a cloverleaf highway in a flooded, candy-colored landscape.
Close-up inspection of all of Davisʼs works brings delightful surprises in the discovery of his remarkable commitment to details such as the individually rendered facial features of the more than 1,000 figures occupying the bleachers in Broadcast (2013–14).
Born in Indianapolis in 1972, Ian Davis has most recently lived and worked in upstate New York and is currently relocating his studio to Los Angeles. He has participated in exhibitions at museums and galleries throughout the U.S. including a solo exhibition in 2010 at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City. Works by the artist are in the collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri; the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska; the Saatchi Gallery in London, and many distinguished private collections in the U.S. and Europe.
Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects is located on the sixth floor of 535 West 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm.