Courtesy of Damon Davis
Lake of Dreams
When Damon Davis was a kid living in East St. Louis, his mother would bring him to her job at a church rectory, at what’s now St. Augustine Catholic Church. There, he was surrounded by stained glass windows, statues of religious icons, and gospel music.
Davis doesn’t identify as Catholic anymore, but “my first inspiration for art [came from] the art created around religion,” he says. He's now a multimedia artist, musician, and filmmaker who co-directed Whose Streets, which premiered at the Sundance Festival in 2017. The film documents the unrest in Ferguson after the fatal 2014 shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson. Davis also created “All Hands on Deck,” a public art project that's now part of the permanent collection at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.
But while in church, Davis heard parables that told of the human condition—stories written so well and in such fantastic detail that they have been retold for generations.
Davis wanted to tell the same types of stories as a way to reflect the community that he grew up in. He wanted to create gods that imitate the hard circumstances that the people who live in these communities go through. He wanted the gods to match Black people's imaginations.
Who would I pray to if Black people had a choice about a god and [it] wasn’t taken from them once they got here? How would those gods show up? Davis wondered.
He read and learned about Yoruba culture, Hindu mythology, Mayans, Greeks, and the Romans. Each culture had multiple gods to represent their communities and the chaos within them. Learning about these religions and cultures and combining that with wanting Black people to be viewed as fully human, Davis decided to create his “Darker Gods” trilogy.
The first part of the trilogy was a visual arts exhibit, “Darker Gods in the Garden of the Low-Hanging Heavens,” hosted at The Luminary. It introduced 12 deities reimagined as Black people who look over the Black experience. These Black gods exist in a garden that is the gateway between where our world and their world meets. Each deity has its own fables and stories to show the complexity of Black life, to challenge the tropes and stereotypes of Black people, and to reclaim their identity as humans.
The introduction of these deities and fables continues now in the second part of his trilogy with the “Lake of Dreams'' storyline, on display at the Betti Ono Gallery in Oakland, California. We meet John Icarus (a play on Icarus in Greek mythology), the only mortal to ever see the Garden of Low-Hanging Heavens. Icarus, who has been tarred and feathered in an attempted lynching, flaps and flails his arms. His neck is in a noose. The feathers that are bound to his arms transform the appendages into wings, and he is able to escape the hangman and find salvation in the garden.
Icarus meets a child god, Blake the Great, chained by the shore of the Lake of Dreams. Blake tells Icarus that a pale horse tricked him by offering him the enchanted chains that now hold Blake in place for a chance to drink from the Lake of Dreams. The horse drank from the lake, left Blake the Great, and continued to trick and hurt other gods and their followers. Blake the Great asks Icarus if he can find and stop the horse and retrieve the key to the chains that bind him. If he does, Icarus can then go out into the lake and fish out his wildest dreams. We know what happens to Icarus next.
St. Louis fans might not be able to visit the exhibit, but accompanying this storyline—and to create total immersion for the audience—is an album called Lake of Dreams that's streaming now as well as a short music video called Light + Water. Light + Water is a surrealist fantasy that depicts a man who falls asleep, drinks from the Lake of Dreams, and experiences a journey of hallucinations: fear, death, and eventually a path to his dreams.
The music, film, and visual art connect all of Davis’ ideas around deconstructing and reestablishing a new way to think about Black people and Blackness itself. In doing so, the "Darker Gods" trilogy not only reframes fables and tales that debunk tropes and stereotypes of Black people. It also questions the very idea of what power can become and how we can self-reflect and redefine what it means to Black people individually and as a whole.
Damon Davis’ Lake of Dreams album is available on all streaming platforms. Later in the fall, Davis will be releasing a limited-edition vinyl.
You can watch the trailer for Light + Water below:
