LEIGH DAVIS

Feeling Tones, 2023 -

Humans attempt to predict the future by manipulating memories of the past. Scientific studies have modeled how our brains produce simulations of future events by drawing on personal memories, stories told by families and friends, and pop culture. This function of our imagination can help us cultivate excitement for milestone events or allow us to problem-solve potentially stressful situations. But can we use it to predict what’s on the other side of death? 

Feeling Tones takes the form of an archive (images, videos, interviews) and series of multi-media installations. The project acts as a repository where future memories are captured, collected, stored, and retrieved, to translate intangible experiences into more permanent, shareable forms. This work invites others to feel into and share in experiences of embodied memory, a process complicated by the uncertainty of death.

In the afterlife, it may be possible for us to relive our experiences, with memories reshuffled into a new order. Editing various media components to work similarly, as a non-linear process where moments that share a quality are grouped, or where pieces are created to produce novel simulations, Feeling Tones explores how individuals perceive experiences of transience differently, how we document, create memories, and locate where we are in our body, and where we dream of going.

In 2023, I began sharing curated collections of short videos (one selection above). These ongoing experiments allow me to play with associations, predictions, dreams, and nightmares around mortality. Selected collections featured in exhibitions at The Kreeger Museum (D.C.) and Past Present Projects (Philadelphia) in 2022. I created a pop-up installation with a new selection specifically for the Modern Chapel at Green-Wood Cemetery (Brooklyn) in December 2023.

Selected collages and photographic works from Feeling Tones will be on view at Spectral Lines, NYC Jan 27 - April 6, 2024. I will build a new framework for the project to unfold as an installation at Grizzly Grizzly, Philadelphia May 3 - June 6, 2024.