Rachel Davis

Orphic Poems ( A good memory of a bad dream) 2017
slide projector, opaque projector, overhead projector, found papers, vinyl
36 x 48 in.

Every night, when I get home, I look at the collections of objects I keep in my home. The spaces we live in are collages themselves. All colors and shapes artists use are continuously reused in art and in life, for they’ve always existed. There is no difference between blood and red paint or books and squares. Language has made itself useful in a world of objects that have a multitude of qualities. I’m interested in how easily language can control our minds. There’s a time before an object has a name, when it is abstract. In my recent series, “Something and Nothing, are Something, are Nothing” 2017, I explore how we give an object its name, which restricts it to a meaning and purpose. It intrigues when I create a collage that is initially abstract, but changes completely when I add text to the image.

My collages practice something bigger than myself, a cycle of reusing, and recycling. I give and take meaning and purpose to a composition and it can no longer exist in the world as it was originally intended. I believe this is a constant cycle in which everyone and thing plays a part. My work questions why an object is that is that particular object and I relate this concept to gender. Every person is composed of the same matter, yet our definitions change our perception. Language is an inevitably poetic tool, it challenges our visual perceptions of each object’s and human’s existence.