NADA Curated by Daonne Huff

Children like to play hide and seek. Vaughn Davis Jr.’s work embodies this instinctive play of hiding and being found as he makes portraits that “evaluate the self as a secret entity, a hidden place.”

Led by emotion, instinct and intuition, Davis Jr’s work is a protest to the practice of painting. His work occupies a teasingly ambiguous realm where painting leaves off, sculpture begins, and performance interlineates. His collection of vibrant forms are characterized by cut, frayed, ripped, shredded, and sliced surface treatments of flat, pigmented and unprimed large canvases. His canvases hang and spill off the wall creating organic, formless, unfurled, open-ended, shape-shifting objects. “The shredding of these canvases signal the search and the opening of the self. As revealed through the action the wall is the conversation in determining who is beneath not only the wall, but who may be subsequently beneath this secretive place.” Like the child who comes out of their secret hiding place, Vaughn Davis Jr’s paintings exist in this moment of reveal.