Today we’d like to introduce you to Cassandra Davis.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I grew up in a small town in Central Illinois, among the cornfields, cicadas and lighting bugs. I was raised in a Pentecostal Evangelical home in quite poor circumstances. The church was really the only escape for me at the time, ironically, from a childhood of trauma. My artistic practice as an adult is really just this endlessly engaging journey in which I’m able to explore and revisit these spaces that marked me so strongly and ask all the questions I couldn’t then.
The difference now is I’m on the other side, on the outside looking in. This sort of dichotomy lives inside the work and is I think what intrigues me about it and keeps me chasing after the work: as a queer artist who has left the Pentecostal church, I’m both an outsider and insider; an outcast and a believer. I’m able to engage with and critique these worlds in a way that’s beyond the dismissive or anthropological. What hasn’t changed, though, is my practice of worship, devotion, and obsession, as expressed in my studio practice.
When I realized this was the most important kind of work for me to make, I began with re-visiting sanctuaries and revival spaces with a camera. That grew into a much more active wrestling of these worlds, and I began to explore these spaces more inter-disciplinarily, beginning with reconstructing the revival tents of my childhood memories, and later moving into performance, textile and video explorations of my Evangelical upbringing.
INTERDISCIPLINARY EXPLORATION
The first revival tent I constructed was actually a recreation of a red and white striped circus-like rental tent in which I experienced powerful worship services (Tabernacle, 2015). Historically, revival tents were temporarily erected outside towns in the deepest of the summer months. Services could last hours—and days, weeks—into hot summer nights as worshippers pleaded for the spirit to move. I reconstructed this specific tent from memory, as no pattern existed and re-walking the memory through the hand seemed as much of the work as the final object. It was hand-sewn and hand-dyed with 200 yards of fabric and suspended from the ceiling. Two years later I made a transparent silk version of this revival tent as a performance object (image, Under the Cover of Darkness, 2016). In both sculptural/functional objects, I was interested in constructing the spaces in which some of the most marked memories of my childhood took place. These revivals were intense experiences where I genuinely felt a powerful presence of the Holy Spirit. These also became spaces that represented trauma for me.
From here I began to explore the performative, physical movements within these spaces. In Under the Cover of Darkness, I worked with eight dancers to reenact, translate, and embody a careful selection of actions from these revivals. Particular gestures I have been fixated on are the “laying of the hands,” raising one’s hands in worship, and being “slain in the spirit.” While my Pentecostal church experienced a range of these supernatural events, the movements of the spirit that have most captivated me are these gestures—moments of intimacy, of touch, and the embodiment of both ecstasy and violence in worship. I continue to explore these themes in my current practice (Baptism 2016, Raising Girls 2018).
THE ARCHIVE
More recently I’ve become engaged with using the archive/research as a tool for my practice. I find that looking to histories is a way for me to unbury content from what I see as a markedly formative part of our reality today. For me, research is as essential a process as is the making: combing through boxes and microfilms looking for answers to my questions. For a few years now I’ve been working with archival photographs of Appalachian revivals, deconstructing and rebuilding the image in an attempt to understand the layers of information embedded in each photograph. I’ve explored this on the loom (Revival 2017, image), and also by screen printing textiles (The Harvest 2018, image) and wrapping them onto hay bales to physically build/deconstruct the image in sculptural scale. The haystacks and weavings begin to look like film strips, and when reorganized or deconstructed, they reveal the unseen. Perhaps it’s a phenomenological approach to exploring the archive?
I also used research into my hometown archives as a foundation for a recent video installation (Sundown Town 2017, image). For this work, I re-created my hometown’s historic 1924 Centennial Parade Celebration as a space for questioning the Nationalist nostalgia for the “Good Old Days.” For me, the work also functioned as a space for me to catalog markers of Midwestern whiteness as reflected in the archive; the small town parade is an incredible site for understanding the cultural identity and values of a community. Through these works, I feel that examining our own histories allows us to make clearer our own contemporary social and political experience.
Please tell us about your art.
I have a strong background in filmmaking and photography, and I work in textile, sculpture, performance, and video installation. My artistic practice examines my own Midwestern Evangelical upbringing. I’m interested in understanding relationships between redemption, resurrection, embodied trauma, and the failure of the American dream. I am enchanted by the power of spiritual ecstasy and how the reclamation of ritual might offer the queer and marginalized body a transcendent experience.
My work also reimagines rural materials like corn and hay, and spaces like the revival or parade —and expands the archival and photographic into embodied form. Through the hand-sewn, hand-woven, and hand-printed, I like to think that my process embodies the obsessive devotion of the Believer.
Who else deserves credit – have you had mentors, supporters, cheerleaders, advocates, clients or teammates that have played a big role in your success or the success of the business?
I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of wonderful mentors take me under their wing as I developed myself as an artist. I’m certainly here because people saw potential in me and wanted to help make space for that. I have had some wonderful mentors in grad school- from filmmakers to fiber artists, to performance artists (Ellen Rothenburg, Daniel Eisenberg, Lisa Vinebaum, Industry of the Ordinary, Claudia Hart, John Paul Morabito, to name just a few). I also had a really sweet experience where at the MFA show I ran into an old mentor who had taught me my very first video installation class in undergrad; they were standing in my video installation at my MFA exhibition without even knowing it was my work. She told me it was powerful and she loved it, and it was incredibly meaningful to have someone like that sort of cap this decade of learning.
Also, an enormous part of my practice involves collaboration with others- performance artists, dancers, filmmakers, musicians, and so on. My work wouldn’t exist without the incredible talent and open-minded collaboration that these individuals have brought to my video and performance works. I think this ethos of bringing others into my practice has changed my work in a powerful way and helped me grow beyond what I could do alone. Also, the role of curators and programmers in helping bring artists into spaces is essential, so I really value those relationships as well.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.questionsfromthesoil.com
- Instagram: @questionsfromthesoil
Image Credit:
Artist’s portrait by Gillian Fry
All other photos by Cassandra Davis
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