Jeremiah
Davis

I am a sculptor, musician, & sound artist looking for meaningful ways to mitigate one medium while wielding the other. While my training is academic, based firmly in tradition skill and observation, but I have since traveled some distance for those early roots to explore new forms of sculpture. As I am both a musician and sculptor, I seek to find meaningful ways to explore music and sound in tangible forms. Some of my sculptures audibly resonate as part of this exploration, while others are silent. Both are represented here.

I’ve spent years trying to figure out who I am as an artist. In this search, I have moved all over the United States seeking out forms and techniques - both old and new - as a means to study art. Initially, I pursued a classical education as I had hoped to join the vanguard of a new figurative movement in art. I spent years drawing and sculpting from life, studying anatomy, and casting the human form. While I still love it – and consider it my home – I came to realize there was an absence for me in that singular pursuit. I suspected there was something new for me to discover just under the surface of what I understood to be art.

For me, the moment came when – while playing an instrument – I had stopped briefly to speak to someone. I’m not sure why I didn’t notice it before, but the instrument came to life without my playing it. It was sympathetically vibrating to the frequencies in my own voice. This instrument - sound sculpture if you will - played itself without help from me. It was an autonomous object of sound, much like myself. This was a start. Having been a musician for almost as long as I have been an artist, I longed for my art to have the intimacy and immediacy music provided. I never realized that those separate paths could be two parts of a whole. I came to understand that what I wanted to do was a wholly contemporary form of artmaking, requiring resources and concepts beyond my studies up to that time. I sought out an institution that would give me the support and freedom I needed to marry the disparate paths of music and art.

After a few years of working as an assistant to other artists, a family tragedy caused me to realize the shortness and preciousness of life. I decided it was time to move on with mine. I moved to Chicago to begin my graduate studies in sculpture and sound art. While there, I began to experiment with different forms of sound sculpture: singular sculptures with accompanying original musical soundtracks (I’m Not Your Friend 2013), objects with embedded recordings that relied on their inherent acoustic nature to house and present new musical compositions (10 Days 2014), and objects related to sound making, but that were utterly silent (Corpus, Artifacts, and Quartet 2015). These artworks allowed me to move in and out of the mediums of sculpture and sound as well as experimenting with how sound transforms our relationship with objects. I learned that sound is the most intimate of mediums. Not only does it fill a space completely and takes its shape (as water does a glass), but it also touches its listeners physically. Hearing - as a sense - is really a modified form of touch. Our brains translate the physical sensation of sensing vibration into what we perceive of as sound. I would begin to make sculptures that touched my audience.