This exhibition, titled 1986, is part of an ongoing autobiographical drawing and painting project begun by the artist in 2001. Throughout this series, Davis has created images made from memory of pivotal eve nts that often focus on subjects of a foreboding, mysterious and/or sexual nature. Davis’ previous subjects have included a student’s illicit thoughts regarding his teacher, embarrassing pre-date anxieties, fetishized sexual games, strange and disconcerting tattoos, tragic schoolboy crushes, brutal hazing rituals and licentious gang initiations.

Davis’ exploration of the dark, mysterious and disturbing continues with the eleven drawings on view at JCP in the exhibition 1986. Focusing on a pivotal year in the artist’s childhood/adolescence, Davis’s new body of work depicts specific cultural references that reflect the anxieties and fears of an impressionable youth coming of age in the late Cold War era. Davis’s trademark, keen draughtsman ship and attention to poignant cultural details, can be seen in Watching ‘Testament’, a lush black & white pencil drawing of a young boy in front of a television watching the eponymous film a bout a nuclear Armageddon in America. As the boy, with gaping mouth, watches a scene between a mother and her dying child, hobgoblins of destruction rise from the boy’s Vuarnet t-shirt logo and swirl about his spine and head. Davis’s choice of subject matter and his acute attention to detail reflect not only the anxieties of an era where the nightmare of instant obliteration by nuclear bomb was a continued reality but reflect how mass media and cultural symbols become indelible icons of our fears and desires.

Davis’ interest in the impressionable realities of life’s polarities such as sex and death and mass culture’s co-dependent enabling strategies is also reflected in the diptych ET and Grandma and the work The Rumor. Rendered in crimson colored pencil ET and Grandma shows the artist’s grandmother in a hospital room on her death-bed, her abject stillness as she lies curled in a fetal position is counter balanced by the animated alien in the work’s companion piece where ET levitates a diverse group of objects for a rapt audience of youngsters. The light entertainment and diversion that the fictitious movie character offers contrasts with the real pain and struggle experienced by the artist’s dying relative and suggests a leveling of the disconnection one is expected to experience between reality and fiction. In The Rumor, we see the belly, groin and thighs of a robed man as he prepares to insert his semi-flaccid penis into the aluminum hose of an old Electrolux. In these works, death, sex and entertainment become a confused amalgam of both pageantry and tragedy where everyday reality is fused with both the fantastic and the pathetically mundane.