How is the air up there? Up there in the highest strata of the social order, past the treeline of the white collars and into the deepest of the deep state, with those whose entitlements can be traced back generationally to the First of Men, where the Grandest of Plans are laid and every “coincidence” is preordained; this is where a select order of men plot and prey, where they keep Alantis off the maps, suppress the proliferation of the electric car, where they ordained Steve Guttenberg a celebrity.
Ian Davis offers us a GOD’S EYE VIEW of THEM, those rarified men who pull the invisible strings that dictate the movements of Big Government, Big Pharma, Big Agra, Big Science, and so on.
Still, in plain view, their maneuvers and objectives are befuddling, circuitous, opaque. In Winter, 2025, we see them scaling or rappelling an icy mountain range. The pleasure or pain of their experience is undefined in the didacticism of their rendering. Is this a military operation, or an executive retreat? Procession, 2025, portrays a colonizer’s ritual of civility, a parade of men atop elephants being led across a bridge. In the foreground, bright orange construction fencing enforces a safe distance from the colonized, who remain intentionally unseen. In Security Clearance, 2025, hundreds of men in identical uniforms wait to show their credentials to suited gatekeepers.
Like the figures within his compositions, Davis’s politics are omnipresent, yet anonymous. Is he depicting socialist futility, or late capitalist ennui? Is it bureaucratic bedevilment, or are they fat cat oligarchs who hoover up everything in sight, leaving only scraps for everyone else? Within GOD’S EYE VIEW, only THEY know the answers.
GOD’S EYE VIEW is Ian Davis’s first solo exhibition with Nicodim, and his first in Los Angeles in over five years.
— Ben Lee Ritchie Handler
Ian Davis (b.1972, Indianapolis, Indiana) studied Fine Arts at the Arizona State University and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His works chronicle moments of human gatherings, often immediately before or after an event, usually a disaster of sorts. The tension of these pre- and post-apocalyptic situations is always palpable. Davis’ exhibitions include GOD’S EYE VIEW, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2025, solo); The Mass Ornament, Galerie Judin, Berlin (2022, solo); Liminal Spaces: Tom Anholt, Ian Davis, Rabia Farooqui, Emma Fineman, Arthur Lemaitre, Radu Oreian, Hiroe Saeki and Waswo X Waswo with R. Vijay, Galerie Isa, Mumbai (2022); Time Takes a Cigarette, Josh Lilley Gallery, London (2021); Gifts from the Flat Files, Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque (2020-21); Majeur Force: Part Two, Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); Stains on a Decade, Josh Lilley Gallery, London (2019); We Contain Multitudes, Galerie Isa, Mumbai (2019); 2nd Dark Age, Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2018, solo).
