REVELATIONS 2022

University of Southern Indiana, New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art New Harmony, IN
Curated by Iris Williamson

In this solo exhibition featuring new and existing work, Cass Davis exhumes collective and personal histories and questions perceptions of history—an excavation of Small Town America. Titling the show after the final apocalyptic Biblical book, Davis explores a multiplicity of transformational experiences, or Revelations. Conversing with the roots of Evangelicalism, whiteness, their own Midwestern upbringing in the church, and New Harmony’s “utopian” attempts, Davis’s work seeks to ask the question, What is to be revived and what is to be dismantled? Revelations implies the removal of the veil—a revelation of truth.

The installation, sculptural, and textile works in Revelations utilize the textures and imagery of rural landscapes. Hand-woven Jacquard textiles featuring archival images of 1920s Appalachian revivals; the 1908 Springfield, IL Race Riot; and the artist’s own family photos allow for a revisitation of complex histories. Hay bales sourced from local farms, natural materials, and roadside architecture evoke a sense of familiarity and curiosity, and conjure the memory embedded in the land.

Revelations embodies the duality of tragedy and ecstasy found in the human search for transcendence. Sifting through archival materials, Davis seeks to uncover what has been hidden. “How can we alter our perceptions of history? What if we recognize that the oppressed past is non-linear; that history remains alive in the present?” Davis states, “Perhaps we can recognize that the ghosts that haunt our lives are speaking to us from the past—that through acknowledging their presence, we may find a place to address our history with honesty and find a path to healing.”

HEARTLAND     Oct 2019- Jan 2020 _{Solo Exhibition, G-CADD, St. Louis}

<sup>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?</sup>

Of Roses and Jessamine, 2016. _{Solo Exhibition
SITE Galleries, Chicago IL}

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<sub>From Tracing Faults
Chicago Artist’s Coalition, January 2020

“Backyard, Monolith offers an immediate access point into the exhibition and its framework. A column of framed soil traces a path from the ground up an into the space of the vaulted gallery ceiling. This monumental structure creates an implicit fault line, a rift that holds a series of unearthed artifacts that create a fragmented glimpse of the rural Midwestern landscape and culture from which they were collected. These objects and materials seem out of place in a contemporary art gallery, and magnify the dissonance between large urban cities like Chicago and the small communities that populate the rural landscape. The top frame contains a Westernized and feminine portrayal of a young Jesus Christ. This inclusion along with the supporting cast of materials points ot Davis’s Evangelical upbringing and underscores the soncervative and religiously driven temperament that steers Midwestern ideology.

In front of the monolith, a weathered platfrom provides a marginally closer view of the structure as it stretches out of reach. The design makes reference to landmark viewing platforms and also to 1920s era revival pulpits. The viewer is invited to step up unto the platform and gaze up with their body at the soil and its contents as they extend into the sky. For the artist, the experience serves as metaphor for the excavation of our histories, of excavating what’s beneath our feet as a possible key to our transcendence.”
-Jeff Robinson, curator</sub>

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Through the re-staging of archival materials, Sundown Town resurrects the artist's 1924 Hometown Centennial Parade celebration as a space for confronting the violence that rests beneath the soil in Small Town America.

Sundown Town challenges the Nationalist nostalgia for the "Good Old Days," questioning what should be resurrected and what should be dismantled. Using the visual language of the 20th century celebration of heartland life ways--the harvest, labor, the hand, the prayer, the menu, the parade--as embodying a darker side, the parade in Sundown Town becomes funeral cortège.

God will/will god lead us   2016
_{SITE Galleries, Chicago}

<sup>Influential Evangelical leaders were mailed hand-woven Jacquard portraits and a letter from the artist. Ongoing project includes letter correspondence between the artist and Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, James Dobson, Ken Ham & Mike Bickle. 

Twin portraits were woven each so that the artist and Evangelical leader were connected through the same weft.</sup>