Hernease Davis

I visited and photographed Sam Gilliam’s piece, Double Merge, while it was installed at Dia:Beacon. Now, I’m taking those negatives into the darkroom to make a kind of merge of my own. I’m using them to make photograms/photographs. Some of these are self-portraits. They are all experiments and excuses to spend time with the photographs I made of Gilliam’s installation. Gilliam is deeply influential to me, and his work has helped me reconcile with some of my recent frustrations with photography and photographic conversations. Gilliam was deeply concerned with the surface of his works, approaching them with improvisation and instinctual gestures.

The longer I make and the more I learn about Gilliam, I’m starting to see a convergence of our processes. I’m going a long for very different reasons. My concerns with photographic surfaces exist for very different reasons. His work is helping me. I’m frustrated with photography’s ability to halt interpretations below the surface. I’m fascinated with Gilliam’s depth requiring our reading to remain there. I’m frustrated with the representational, indexical expectations of photographic work. I’m fascinated with Gilliam’s embrace and ceaseless interrogation of art through abstraction. I am frustrated with conversations around photographic art that want to hold on to the familiar. I am fascinated by how free I feel in the presence of Gilliam’s paintings.