Hood Niggas Tenting, a set of 28 work from 2020 impressed by Lamborghini sports activities automobiles, bears a trait attribute of David-Jeremiah: a maximalist impulse that produces works of serious scale and densely layered content material. Lamborghini references run by means of lots of his works, and the best set up of Hood Niggas Tenting, the artist stated, is “in a large circle, comprised of larger-than-life, Stonehenge-esque pedestals that act as freestanding chunks on a white dice wall.”
His imaginative and prescient for the work is to evoke what he describes as “peak Texas scorching.” He continued: “Have you ever ever checked out a fellow camper from throughout a campfire? The fireplace methods you into believing that the easiest way to see the particular person in entrance of you is from its perspective. From this vantage level, you’re the flame. You’re not on hearth—you are hearth. A hearth to maintain some hood niggas who determined to go tenting heat.”
Since his first solo exhibition in 2020, David-Jeremiah has been a persistent phenom on the Texas artwork scene. His urgency and methodical studio observe emerged from a interval of self-evaluation after spending almost 4 years in jail for aggravated theft dedicated when he was an adolescent. Whereas in jail, he conceived concepts for a number of collection of works. Hood Niggas Tenting was certainly one of them. One other was a group of work primarily based on Lamborghini steering wheels.
Titled I Drive Thee (2021–23), the collection—on view on the Clark Artwork Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, by means of January—explores how some Lamborghinis are named after bulls that find yourself killing matadors. One instance is the Lamborghini Miura, alluding to a breed of Spanish bulls which are giant, fierce, and crafty. For David-Jeremiah, this description echoes the way in which the Black male physique is commonly seen as a website of masculinity, violence, and potential.
David-Jeremiah: L’Anima, 2023.
Thomas Clark/Courtesy the Artist
In one other group of works, the “Acronym Work,” David-Jeremiah acknowledges a duality between his pursuit of artwork in its purest types and the realities of being a Black man in America. The acronyms “I.A.H.Y.F.F.A.W.D.” and “N.F.D.B.J.W.B.D.” signify indecipherable phrases of hate spoken aloud by the artist. Others signify inside dialogue imagined between a bull and a matador. “The unique acronyms shrouded this sentiment from a sure kind of Black particular person in the direction of white folks, however they’re restricted by the truth that it’s simply [a conversation between men],” he stated. “I created a bull’s model of the acronyms, which elevates the dialog.”
David-Jeremiah has additionally labored in different types. I Coronary heart Micah (2019–23) is a video by which he places bumper stickers on police cruisers that reference Micah Xavier Johnson, who killed 5 cops in Dallas in 2016. The stickers are a part of a fantasy narrative by which the police are grateful that their fellow officers have been killed and reform their impulse to kill Black folks. For The Lookout (2019), he staged a efficiency throughout which he lived in a cinder-block cell for 3 weeks.
Such works might be jarring and unsettling. There isn’t any respite in David-Jeremiah’s oeuvre, simply depth and plenty of awe, humor, shock, and dread. “I like being accountable for how the observe evolves in and out of doors of how I haven’t been capable of,” he stated. “Every part you push from your self is past you. It’s righteous to go away a greater model of your self behind to maintain the you you aren’t anymore firm—simply because it’s divine to ship a greater model of your self ahead to present hope to the you you aren’t but.”