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The Essence & The Choice 
Saturday, September 20, 3:30 - 4:30PM

Secrist | Beach 
1801 West Hubbard Street, Chicago, IL, 60622


The Essence & The Choice is the latest performance by Matty Davis, performed with his 13 year-old stepson, and featuring dramaturgy by two-time Pulitzer finalist Chloé Cooper Jones. Full of play, physical risk, trust, and vulnerability, The Essence & The Choice explores fatherhood through the impacts of our presence in and absence from one another’s lives. Anyone involved in the chromosomal making of a child is, biologically, in “essence,” a parent. To mother or to father, however, is a “choice,” a verb, distinct in that it involves ongoing stewardship, teaching, learning, and sacrifice.

At their widest, these concepts of “essence” and “choice” interrogate who we are and who we decide to be; they initiate a confrontation with determination and freedom and what new meanings may emerge at the threshold of this ancient binary.

Integrated into the live performance is an excerpt from a series of photographs made at White Sands National Park. These photographs were shot over the course of approximately one hour, as the sun set. During that time, the performer Matty Davis repeatedly engaged an explosive choreographic act upon a massive gypsum sand dune, which is slowly and visibly reshaped by his force. Throughout the photographs, Davis’s body is rendered absent by individual Polaroid photographs taken by the two people, a mother and her child, who witnessed him. This photographic interplay makes visible the residue and repercussions of the performer’s presence while concealing specificity of his movement and identity.

While art history is rife with phenomenal work regarding mothering and motherhood, work related to fatherhood, from a father’s perspective, is less represented. The Essence & The Choice seeks to explore both the contours and core of this relative absence.

The Essence & The Choice is accompanied by a unique, editioned publishing work made in collaboration with designer Matt Wolff that is available for free (first-come-first serve) to anyone who attends the performance.







MATTY DAVIS (b. Pittsburgh, PA) is a visual artist and choreographer engaged in embodied explorations of the tension between fragility and fortitude. 

His work frequently uses choreography as an instrument to activate high-stakes relationships—ranging from the interpersonal to the cosmic—around some of the most important aspects of human life: trust, risk, love, empathy, commitment, and responsibility. Marked by full-throttle physicality and inventive movement vocabularies, his performances have been described as “balancing ecstatically on the edge of life and death” (Jesse Zaritt).

Institutionally, Davis’s work has been presented by the High Line, New York, NY; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; The Momentary, Bentonville, AR;  the ICA Miller at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA; the Fine Arts Center at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR; KANAL – Centre Pompidou, Brussells, Belgium; Bozar, Brussells, Belgium; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; the Max Ernst Museum, Brühl, Germany; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY, and Steppenwolf Theater, Chicago, IL, amongst many others.

He is the recipient of a 2025 MacDowell Fellowship and a 2026 Bogliasco Fellowship. His work has been featured and written about in BOMB, Frieze, and the New York Times Magazine. He currently teaches at Columbia University.