Ladies and Gentlemen, customarily a polite address to an audience, is used ironically by Brandon Davey as the title of his exhibit to signal a sometimes rude battle between the sexes. Davey is a young man understandably preoccupied with the opposite sex, but being an artist he wants to channel this obsession into his work. What he intended as a dispassionate exposition of gender roles among his peers became a passionate contest between the conflicting masculine and feminine forces within the artist himself.
One work epitomizes this conflict; but before I describe it I’d like to explore some of Davey’s mixed-media framed sculptures that stand at a cool, ironic distance from the subject. Using urethane molds he replicates guns, hand grenades and gas masks (symbols of the male proclivity toward war and violence), then mounts them on boards covered in silk floral wedding fabrics (getting married being something of a female obsession). The frames are traditional hollow and convex crown mouldings painted white. The choice of this moulding needs some explanation. From simple decorative boundaries in ancient times, frames were reshaped and hand-crafted to become religious and status symbols. By the 18th century they were mass-produced, and by the 20th century sleek profiles were designed to complement modern art. Elaborate frames survived into our own time to become settings for banal art. Their use with conceptual art like Davey’s carries a coded meaning in the art world—the artist wants to turn accepted beliefs on their heads. In Davey’s case, don’t take masculine and feminine stereotypes at face value.
Davey’s work “Welcome Home” in the 3Dementia show (a completely white door festooned with a Christmas wreath made of army insignia on one side and a white silk-lined coffin interior on the other) used whiteness to echo the subject matter of death and to emphasize the subversive subject’s affinity with traditional marble sculpture. Davey uses white in the same way here. Pink plays an important role in several works, as well, since we all know pink is for girls. “The Knot” is made up of three grenades, a pink and white one linked by metal rings—it suggests that “tying the knot,” the implied metaphor of the title, could get explosive. Other titles give clues to the meaning, too; in “Mexican Standoff” two handguns, a snub-nosed revolver and a smaller Derringer .22, are pointed at each other in a confrontation where no one can emerge as a clear winner. That the guns and hand grenades are stand-ins for men and women almost goes without saying.
According to the artist, the most dialogue-stimulating works are a pair of paintings simply titled “Boys” and “Girls.” The genesis of these works is interesting. Davey pinned a canvas to his studio wall, formatted it like a scoreboard with the headings “boys” and “girls,” then attached a pencil on a string. He invited studio visitors and friends, male and female, to write down their thoughts. It “set off energy,” Davey told me, and although not originally intended as such, it inspired him to create these paintings. They are wonderful paintings—part graffiti, part Jasper Johns elegant letterforms. The headings, in a mock gothic font created by Davey, announce the serious, time-honored nature of the enterprise, which he then undermines by painting some of the letters in white, pink and baby blue. Using the same wedding fabric as the framed sculptures to form a support, he draws doodles, cartoons and an expletive. Dabs of thickly applied paint create a tapestry of random thoughts and rich texture.
For Davey, sculpture and painting are metaphors for gender and conflict. Tellingly, many of Davey’s works are hybrids of sculpture and painting. For me, “The Daydream” is the work that most successfully weds the feminine yin and masculine yang. Intended as a metaphor for the invasion of sculpture into painting, it consists of nine ceramic forms, deliberately thrown to appear softer and more feminine, then glazed with gold lustre to give them a hard, masculine finish. Simultaneously phallic and breast-like, these “spikes” appear to tear through the canvas, leaving drips of reddish-brown paint in their wake, and, placed at regular intervals, suggest both order and chaos. Although its implication of violent sexual penetration is unmistakable, it also brilliantly reconciles the opposing forces within the artist.
Brandon Davey is one of our most talented homegrown artists. A recent graduate of UNLV, he is currently getting his graduate art degree from the prestigious School of Visual Arts in New York City. That he’s having his first one-man show in Las Vegas at the new Jennifer Marie Gallery is exciting and bodes well for the future. Don’t miss it.
Ladies and Gentlemen
Artwork by Brandon Davey
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Jennifer Marie Gallery in the Arts Factory
686-3164,
jennifermariegallery.com