At pickup basketball games, one of Portland artist Jeremy Okai Davis’s friends would shout “thick gravy” when he hit a shot. People say all kinds of things in the uniquely competitive trance of a pickup game, metaphors and brags ranging from poetic and even profound to completely nonsensical. “Thick gravy” was tough to decode, though. And when Davis asked, his friend’s answer launched a sort of pop culture feedback loop. It was an attempt at a reference to the 1990 movie House Party. “Peanut, fix me some of that Dick Gregory,” uncle Otis says in the movie, referring to the diet drink the legendary comedian and activist put out in the ’80s. According to the comments section of a nine-second clip from the film on YouTube, with nearly 55,000 views, Davis’s friend was not alone in hearing “thick gravy” instead of “Dick Gregory.”

It’s exactly these instances—generational games of telephone, digested, mutated, and transmogrified collages of culture—that Davis is interested in painting. About the Dick Gregory malapropism, he painted Tareyton (Dick Gregory), a portrait of the comedian overlaid with a pack of Tareytons, the cigarettes he smoked onstage, and a glossy plate of biscuits and (no doubt thick) gravy. Collected, the subject matter arrays past and present, personal and public performances, onscreen, -stage, and court. from the stage, a calling…, Davis’s current show at Elizabeth Leach gallery, takes up the endless subject of Black performance. From ’70s stand-up to minstrel shows, magic acts to vaudeville numbers and cakewalks, Davis’s paintings signal the complex function performance has served in American Black culture, as a simultaneous means for expression and oppression, exploitation and protestation.

Next to Dick Gregory, making something of a diptych, is half a portrait of Richard Pryor; a glassy, sparkling plate of candied yams takes up the top third of the painting and a sign advertising “Big Bertha's Sweet Potatoes” is plastered over Pryor’s face. Because, of course, Kendrick Lamar once declared that “the yam brought it out of Richard Pryor.” So many words on the internet have been spent trying to decode what exactly “the yam” is. It’s a woman’s seductive curves, a reference to drug balloons, and a vegetable thoroughly engrained in African cuisine. It’s “the ability to subvert without appearing to subvert,” is where a W Magazine profile of Lamar landed. The yam, here, is a stand-in for power, an intractable, invaluable vitality. Maybe the yam is the glamour in that dangerous glint of unpredictability we call stage presence.

Both paintings play in what the philosopher Julia Kristeva called intertextuality—the ways artworks and cultural artifacts (“texts”) affect each other back and forth through time, accumulating and altering their references and inspirations to then be, in turn, altered and accumulated by future works. By collecting them, Davis seems to be asking, how do these past cultural touchstones function in the present? How does one thing, however accurately it’s interpreted, eventually become something else? When does Dick Gregory, the comedian known for addressing bigotry onstage in a Southern US governed by Jim Crow, become shorthand for a diet drink and a swish and eventually a plate of biscuits and gravy? These two paintings play directly with references across timelines, but the rest of the show homes in on singular historical figures and spaces, showing how re-presenting these lesser- or unknown figures in a modern context complicates their legacies.

Davis paints exclusively from photo reference (confirmed by the fact that everyone he paints is dead), which gives his layered pictures the archival feel of news clippings and photos that look important because they’re old. It’s as if someone saved this information and your job as viewer is to understand why. Such is the case with Hopalong Hamlet (Juliette Whittaker), a layered portrait of Pryor’s first mentor. Whittaker taught Pryor at an afterschool community center in Peoria, Illinois, first casting him in a production of Rumpelstiltskin and ultimately aiding in his path from humble beginnings to stardom. In effect, the painting is both a tribute to Whittaker and a subtext of how Richard Pryor became Richard Pryor.

Resort (Chowan Beach) is named for the vacation town in North Carolina, Davis’s home state. Starting in the 1920s, Chowan Beach was an oasis for Black Americans living in this violently segregated country. A bathhouse, dance hall, restaurant, and even a carousel made for something like a hidden wonderland: a space to vacation from oppression. It also drew major performers, the likes of B.B. King, James Brown, and Sam Cooke. Which brings up a crucial aspect of performance: By definition, a show needs an audience. At Chowan Beach, Black performers played to Black audiences, creating a rare opportunity for a show as unbothered by a white gaze as was possible a century ago.

By contrast, the painting Cake Walk (Bert & George), a dual portrait of fa­med vaudeville performers Bert Williams and George Walker, directly addresses the ways an audience can grossly twist a performance. The cakewalk was a dance developed in the late nineteenth century in which slaves covertly mocked slave owners’ mannered gestures. Slave owners eventually held competitions—giving out a literal cake to the winner—unaware they were the butt of the joke. And as if that weren’t enough of a loop, the act soon became a regular facet of minstrel shows, in which white dancers performed the cakewalk in blackface, appropriating and, in a jarringly ignorant racist romp, mocking the dance they failed to realize mocked them.

In the painting, Davis spells out “Cake Walk” with prominent letters in primary colors. Other paintings in the show feature text, but this, the crudest example of a cultural phenomenon being abducted by racism, features the most overt words. “Resort” is spelled out across the top of Resort (Chowan Beach), but you can only see it if you catch the right light, if you know to look for it, as it’s painted black over black. Whether the hidden text is a reference to the resort’s somewhat covert nature or to its entirely Black patronage, it too seems to comment on how an audience shapes a performance.

Minstrel versions of the cakewalk wanted to make perfectly clear they were stealing the Black dance, whereas Sam Cooke didn’t need such flagrant signaling to be understood at Chowan Beach. Still, however authentic the bond between performer and audience, every show is at least a little bit synthetic. Putting on a show is stretching reality to represent something intangible. And because a performance is a living work, specific to a unique moment that can never be repeated, it’s necessarily wild. You need the yams, you need thick gravy. Things are not to be as they appear, and that unwieldy power enables both greatness and horror. Davis’s paintings embody this complicated duality while placing past and present in dialogue. They collapse time and force you to ask how much things stay the same as they appear to change.