GWEN DAVIS-BARRIOS

A Quiet Whisper, Close to Your Ear

I love walking alone at night. The dark magnifies all the sounds and puts my senses on high alert. The night sky’s reflected luminosity functions along with artificial lights to create a space that doesn’t exist in daylight, and the photos that I take with my phone's flash heighten this transformation by starkly lighting up the foreground (sometimes to the point of near erasure) and hanging a veil over the background so that the distance recedes to roiling shapes masked in black. On night walks I understand the principle that black is full of colors. Despite this feeling of rapture, however, when I walk at night my brain projects footsteps padding along half a block behind me in the darkness. Trees and bushes become potential hiding places for predators, and the love I feel for my surroundings at night is silently accompanied by the sinking terror of possibility that the dark contains. This complicated love is the same thing that draws me into the natural world and makes me ask so many questions about it.

I chose the title A Quiet Whisper, Close to Your Ear for its intonation of intimacy and the fact that it could reflect either love or fear. Depending on the whisperer, a quiet, close whisper could imply tenderness or it could invoke a heart-stopping threat of danger. This duality is crucial to my thinking and my work, and reflects my questions about living in, mourning, and loving a spoiled earth.

The flash also illuminates the plants in the foreground so brightly that they appear almost as though they are seen by daylight, while the middle and backgrounds drop steeply into shadow. The strong contrast in lighting emphasizes the deep darkness of the background and the unknowability of what might be in the shadows. In my night paintings I am interrogating my own reaction to the mysterious and beautiful ways that my surroundings transform into an enticing and dangerous alternate world under nighttime lighting conditions.

In my painting Basketball Night a child bounces a basketball next to a brightly-lit garden shed that’s enclosed by encroaching hedges and trees. They are unaware of the viewer, whose perspective implicates them as an unseen voyeur.

It is important in this painting that the figure’s engulfing surroundings be lush and painterly as a reflection of the entrancing way that the suburban landscape’s various light sources wake up a beautiful and transformed nocturnal world. There is no point to me in depicting the horror of night without its seductive side, which is what makes the horror even possible—if the night weren’t so beautiful, I would have no reason to risk its danger.

In the Rocky Mountains where I live, hunters whose role in controlling deer populations is vital to rebalancing the ecosystem are some of the same people who kill animals for trophies. I think about the fact that there’s a really fine line between loving and destroying something, and I’m afraid that I am terrible at toeing that line, along with all other humans. How much of what I do out of love is the effectual equivalent of mounting a buffalo’s head to my wall? By merely living in a house that is connected to electricity, gas, and water I am participating in the continual exploitation of finite resources, and even my environmentally-aware actions feel futile. This sense of futility fuels my work, which is about love but inflected by failure. It makes me sad that the things that I do out of love for my surroundings and the natural environment that I live nestled in, like driving around it and looking at it, are part of the problem. The art comes from curiosity about and pain surrounding that rupture, because I care about the Earth and I care about the things in it and I long for it to be healed and well.  

A prerequisite for loving the earth is mourning her. Even so, I sometimes find human detritus and garbage beautiful. In my painting A Place Where You Live I am curious about the delicate crinkles of grocery sacks and the way they glow amidst a dark, semi-frozen garden, even though they reference a larger problem. 

A big part of my work is dependent on just looking at things, and A Place Where You Live exemplifies the importance of this intense looking. Looking at something for an extended period of time allows me to withhold judgement over it and interact with it personally, as well as draw away from cultural notions that flavor the way that I experience my space in a world brimming with ideas and opinions. In A Place Where You Live, the juxtaposition of intensely-rendered plant material tangling around itself in lovingly-made brush marks with the very terrestrial reality of plastic grocery sacks that have blown into the scene complicates the notion that something objectively bad like pollution is inescapably ugly. I want to hold the sadness and frustration of plastic trash alongside the wholesomeness of a plant’s life cycle and I want to find grace in the complex reality that I am incapable of knowing anything that’s truly unspoiled. The process of looking at and painting my environment allows me to consider my personal relationship with it and slows down my judgement-making regarding the complex tangle of good and ill that comes from my surroundings. 

Living in a suburb means that I am caught between love and hate, and most of all I am aware of my own fallibility. It is important for my artmaking to occupy a nebulous space between what is beautiful and what is flawed, ugly, and problematic.

In The Suburbs are Beautiful at Night, a small copse of trees hovers over a cement wall and a parking lot that are illuminated by the kind of glowing light that streetlights spread over unused corners of suburban space. Spaces like this, where something resembling the natural world collides with the utilitarian and unconsidered, feel lonely and sympathetic to me. This collision of natural and fabricated, where human hands modify the course of natural laws, is the foundational concept of growing a garden.

Mythologically gardens are echoes of Eden and the gardener’s role is to both stave off the entropic forces that hearken back to a Fall and to validate the existence of those same forces through their labor. The necessity for cultivation and garden work comes from the universe’s natural tendency toward chaos, and I am curious about the struggle between a gardener’s ideal outcome and their lack of control. Melon Trellis, which depicts a wild tangle of melon vines writhing around a supportive wooden structure, comes from that curiosity. Like Before the Fires, Melon Trellis contains a sharp contrast between the brightly lit foreground and a deeply receding background. In Before the Fires the background darkness means that viewer experiences the possibility of a mysterious encounter with an unknown figure, but the wooden structure in Melon Trellis acts as a vestige of a human figure, which the viewer interfaces with directly. In this painting, the viewer experiences a reckoning with an unknown human through their intervention in the space.

I need lots of time with an image before I am ready to claim it as my artwork. This is one of the reasons why I make paintings instead of embracing the source images as final works. To borrow a baking metaphor, the images usually feel underproved to me as photographs but painting them allows them to develop and rise. This sense of underdevelopment in the source images comes from the troublesome cultural presupposition of accuracy and truth that comes along with photography. Painting’s freedom from this supposition means that it is a naturally more inventive, imaginary land than photography. Painting opens a window to fiction within an image that invokes a sense of memory and dreams. While I want to distance myself from photography’s assumption of factuality, working from photographs, which enjoy the built-in implication of a viewer behind the camera, allows me to insert myself as a presence in the image and revisit the psychological space from the time of an image’s capture.  

The tie to physical space in Bringing Flowers Home at Night is intentionally confused. A tangle of flowers and weeds features prominently in the foreground while dark shapes and orbs of lights blur throughout the middle and background. Luminous backlit screens and a red blip in the bottom-left corner (a hazard light button) along with road signs locate the space inside a vehicle on a darkened street, but the blurs and chaos of flowers is much more immediate and overpowering than the location. Along with the confusion in this work, the act of painting is of primary importance. I care about the act of painting and the transformation that takes place between photographic image-making and the development of a work in paint.

Painting gives me time to think around a composition and move my hands through it. Painting gives me time with color and requires me to solve problems about colors and the way they interact with each other and trick my eyes in a way that echoes the time I need to think on the walks. I feel something visceral and important move inside me when I move paint around.

Night Gardening is a four-part polyptych based on close observation of a tangle of tomato plants. From left to right, the paintings draw closer to the subject matter, mimicking the shifting perspective as a viewer might approach the plants. By painting them in increasingly close-up views, I experienced distinct painting experiences with each panel. Making these intensely observational works is a meditative, almost trance-like experience. After a few hours of close looking I become less cognizant of the subject matter and the painting feels more like translating blotches and shapes and colors rather than depicting plants. Of all the works I made for this show, Night Gardening is the one that is most about the physicality of paint and the transformation that happens between a photo and a painting.

I began building my thesis show under the name “Sanctuary for a Future World,” with the idea being that it would explore my sense of futility regarding the way that the world works. In my proposal I wrote that "while recognizing its futility, Sanctuary for a Future World represents the urge to care deeply for something that is already lost, like a bird building a nest for chicks that will never hatch." I wrote this statement while sheltering in place in my small apartment and when artmaking felt like a very difficult and very futile thing to do. The thing about this statement that still makes sense to me now that I am in a situation with more sophisticated coping tools for the global pandemic is that there is no certainty in art, and all artmaking is in effect like a mother bird building a nest for her already-dead chicks. Artmaking matters because it is an act of devotion, not because it is utilitarian. Art’s futility makes it an act of faith. I don't feel sad about this usually. Usually I think that the nebulous nature of artmaking and its utilitarian uselessness are part of what make it beautiful and important.