Portals
From Ralph: This collection of latex pieces explores ways in and out of a body, of a space, & of a psychic state. It includes casts of the artist’s navel & nipple. It was created during the height of COVID lockdown, while craving skin to skin contact & escapism.
Ossifications
This disparate and immersive installation explores architectural abstraction and memory held within spaces. These sculptures are ghosts as well as pendulums, keepers of time and memory. They are bulging reminders that history and human experience cannot be plastered or painted over.
First Dress
I often ask myself whether femininity is ingrained like skin, or performed like the clothes we wear, like a dress. This piece imagines that there is a secret layer under our skin that holds the answer, like our fascia is a text that can never be read.
Future Fossils
This series of memetic & fabricated historical documents explore the earth and the body as a database amid an impending apocalypse. The pieces are an attempt to remember small moments and memorialize the trans body, which has historically been left out of archive.
I Almost Became an Angel
This levitating sculpture is a celebration of the body I still have, one that could have easily ceased to exist, one that with all its pain and failures still wakes up with me every morning, lifting me up amid immaterial legislation and very material violence.
About the artist: Ralph Skunkie Davis is a transdisiplinary transgender artist whose sculptures act as liberatory tools, complicating the perception of non normative bodies in space through biomimicry, installation, prosthesis, and body modification.