Realities Obscura is the first of several exhibitions of the multimedia project, Hiraeth. For Realities Obscura, Donovan Davidson presents the experiences of his peers, portraying a panorama of realities that correlate with one another as a unified microcosmic human experience. As a guitarist, Davidson collaborates in live performance with percussionist Adam Smith to create complex rhythms that reflect the cumulative content captured within interviews and photographs. Audio interviews feature a black man embracing his multifaceted identity relating to family, race, class, and sexuality. Sixteen silver gelatin prints bound by deep frames project scenes of dilapidated beauty--emanating phases of darkness and yearning through bays of light.
Obscura references the natural optical phenomenon that occurs within a camera obscura when an image of a scene at the other side of a screen is projected through a small hole, reversed and inverted, reflecting to the viewer an altered interpretation of reality. Realities Obscura is a multi-sensory project that utilizes film photography, peer-to-peer interviews, and instrumental music to explore individual experiences within social systems. The juxtaposition of mediums illustrates commonality within what appears to be different and divergent. Through high-contrast compositions, simultaneously depressive and energizing, Realities Obscura reveals the strife of the individual, emphasizing the experiences that are common to many, yet difficult to confront for most.
Hiraeth is a Welsh word for a homesickness, a home to which you cannot return, which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of days gone. Hiraeth embodies the universal human instinct to seek the familiar in the life of another, our shared impetus to inhabit mutual experiences, an exploration of human consciousness as the composite of the past and the future.