Cass Davis


HEARTLAND     Oct 2019- Jan 2020

Solo Exhibition, G-CADD, St. Louis

A view of the factory, an American flag at half-staff. The landscape, an infinite expanse of field. The revival. The harvest. A death, a resurrection— a haunting, no doubt. In Heartland, we are asked to consider the landscape as embodying both felt and unknown trauma. We are prompted to take a closer look at an identity so close and familiar that we don’t stop to listen to the ghosts trapped inside.

Heartland examines the artist’s own Midwestern Evangelical upbringing. Their sculptures investigate relationships between redemption, resurrection, embodied trauma, and the failure of the American dream. Locating these sculptures within the very landscape to which they point presents a new kind of context for the work. What relationships develop when the landscape is reflected back at itself? What stories does it tell? Does the material allow for embodied trauma to speak?