The Essence & The Choice (2025) 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.