Wade in the Water

Superhouse is pleased to present Wade in the Water, a solo exhibition by Vaughn Davis Jr. The exhibition brings together a group of new works alongside a site-responsive installation that approaches painting not as image, but as a condition shaped by action, material, and space. Working on unstretched canvas, Davis Jr applies pigment while the surface remains wet, allowing color to bleed, pool, and disperse. Water functions as both medium and agent, carrying dye across the surface before receding. The canvas is then cut, folded, and creased, shifting from a passive support into an active structure. What begins as a field becomes a form: painting is not composed so much as it is altered, stressed, and reconfigured through physical intervention. Much of this work originates on the studio floor, where the artist moves across the surface as dye saturates the fabric. Mark-making extends beyond the brush to include tearing, bending, and pressure—gestures that register directly in the material. The resulting works occupy an unstable position between painting and sculpture, defined less by image than by the forces that shape them—absorption, weight, and displacement. In Davis Jr's practice, the canvas is not a ground for depiction but a site of continual change. Its instability is central: edges rupture, planes collapse, and surfaces refuse to remain fixed. Installed in direct response to the architecture, the works fold into corners, span thresholds, and engage the room as a lived space rather than a neutral container. The exhibition's title references the African American spiritual Wade in the Water. To wade is to move within a threshold—neither fully submerged nor fully dry, but navigating a shifting, unstable ground where movement is cautious, responsive, and contingent. That condition is both conceptual and material in Davis Jr's work. Water initiates each composition, but its presence lingers as a logic: forms remain suspended between states, not fully resolved as painting or sculpture, but held in a space of transition. This sense of partial immersion extends to the installation, where each work is contingent on its placement and remains open to adjustment, negotiation, and change. Wade in the Water positions painting as an active, time-based process—one that resists fixed identity and instead holds form in a state of ongoing transition. Vaughn Davis Jr. (b. 1995) is an artist whose practice expands abstraction through the physical deconstruction of painting. Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, he approaches the canvas as both surface and object. Through pouring, soaking, tearing, folding, and creasing, he alters the support and allows gravity and tension to shape the work. His compositions sit between painting and sculpture and register movement, pressure, and change. Davis Jr received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Webster University in St. Louis, USA. He has presented solo exhibitions at Romer Young Gallery in San Francisco, USA; Dimensions Variable in Miami, USA; CAM. Contemporarie in Chicago, USA; and the Aronson Fine Arts Center at Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis. His work has appeared in group exhibitions at Nazarian / Curcio in Los Angeles, USA; New Art Dealers Alliance; Tripoli Gallery in Sagaponack, USA; Malin Gallery in New York, USA; Philip Slein Gallery in St. Louis, USA; and the Front Triennial in Akron, USA.