How is the air up there? Up there within the highest strata of the social order, previous the treeline of the white collars and into the deepest of the deep state, with these whose entitlements may be traced again generationally to the First of Males, the place the Grandest of Plans are laid and each “coincidence” is preordained; that is the place a choose order of males plot and prey, the place they maintain Alantis off the maps, suppress the proliferation of the electrical automotive, the place they ordained Steve Guttenberg a celeb.
Ian Davis provides us a GOD’S EYE VIEW of THEM, these rarified males who pull the invisible strings that dictate the actions of Large Authorities, Large Pharma, Large Agra, Large Science, and so forth.
Nonetheless, in plain view, their maneuvers and targets are befuddling, circuitous, opaque. In Winter, 2025, we see them scaling or rappelling an icy mountain vary. The pleasure or ache of their expertise is undefined within the didacticism of their rendering. Is that this a navy operation, or an govt retreat? Procession, 2025, portrays a colonizer’s ritual of civility, a parade of males atop elephants being led throughout a bridge. Within the foreground, vivid orange development fencing enforces a protected distance from the colonized, who stay deliberately unseen. In Safety Clearance, 2025, a whole bunch of males in an identical uniforms wait to indicate their credentials to suited gatekeepers.
Just like the figures inside his compositions, Davis’s politics are omnipresent, but nameless. Is he depicting socialist futility, or late capitalist ennui? Is it bureaucratic bedevilment, or are they fats cat oligarchs who hoover up all the pieces in sight, leaving solely scraps for everybody else? Inside GOD’S EYE VIEW, solely THEY know the solutions.
GOD’S EYE VIEW is Ian Davis’s first solo exhibition with Nicodim, and his first in Los Angeles in over 5 years. —Ben Lee Ritchie Handler
