Jazz always keeps you on the edge. There is no final chord. There may be a long chord, but no final chord. And it agitates you…There is something underneath that is incomplete.
-Toni Morrison and Nellie McKay. “An Interview with Toni Morrison.” in Contemporary Literature
There's this thing about movement, obviously, yes: the sleight of the hand, of the shadow, slight reflection, some refraction, that place, that face, that knowing. Kenturah Davis is a master of this transition, shifting scope and focus in a single shot, commanding both viewer and subject into an ethereal fourth-dimensional space. With her lenticular print duration I (jada), 2024, and pigment print tangents (jada-marjani-marcella), 2024, Davis extends time through her compulsion to gather at the seams of movement locating a nearly intangible, unbound subject. Akin to jazz’s spontaneity and place on the edge, Davis’s photographs find focus in the instability and chatter that improvisation—be it light, aperture, or matter—offers in each moment. A single subject echos into infinite portals with duration I (jada) while in tangents (jada-marjani-marcella), the three womens bodies and physical space extend into diverging rays of light. Here, intent and chance play within the frame while also, highlighting the precipice of something just beyond the boundaries.
In the above epigraph, Toni Morrison looks to the profound innovation within the unknowing, what she names the underneath, that jazz offers in tone, pace, and illegibility. Davis, an artist committed to the utility/shadow/structure of language as a technology within her broad artistic practice, also finds herself within the realm of jazz’s underneath, blurring and collapsing edges of perception. In these two prints, language is the gesture relaying and creating a looking that is home in the incomplete.