Breath as a Boundary

In this text-based portrait, Kenturah Davis summons the image of a young black woman in jeans and a tank top using oil paint applied with rubber stamp letters. Using letters from the title’s phrase, "Breath as a Boundary," she deliberately thwarts legibility in the same way that she obscures her subject’s face. As the artist describes, “The pairing of poetic phrases with blurry images offers a path to think about the grey areas in language and even in our lexicon’s failure to adequately describe some kinds of experiences.” Davis embossed the edges of the woman’s body and spinning braids, creating raised areas of paper that further blur the boundaries of her body and accentuate her motion. “We often use language to carve out distinctions between one thing and another. I want to complicate ideas about meaning, reception, and perception . . . and have found refuge in blurring and doubling to do this,” Davis states. Her portraits underscore the ways that language and identity are always in flux.