The artist confessed to your commentator that he worked on this picture for a long period of time without knowing what precisely he would place as the focal point of the stage. His choice of the reel to reel audio player is provocatively cryptic. The work is silent, so the content of the emitted sound is a mystery. The device could just as well be making no noise at all.

In a dialogue with Leslie Tonkonow, Davis explained why he waited until the end to select the focal point of a similar picture, “I spent weeks constructing the room and the clumps of figures but I had no idea what was going to happen on the stage or what the painting was ultimately about. Eventually I realized that the subject was the situation in which the huge crowd stares and waits.” Much like the crowd’s faces, the work’s meaning derives it potency from an irresolvable ambiguity surrounding the situation.

Ian Davis, Climate, detail view, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 86 inches.

The work’s title Climate is a more discrete marker of meaning: the picture of course might be framed as a commentary on climate change. Is it news of a natural environment in disrepair about which we can hear and worry, but not see? It could also be framed as a commentary on the political climate. Do we allow the media to brainwash us into the obedience of conformity? Part of the strength of this picture is its ability to accommodate such varied interpretations. Like an engaging riddle, it’s satisfyingly difficult to unravel and solve. You keep looking at it convinced that you will eventually unlock the picture's meaning.

At the end of his life, Freud became very interested in the impact of group psychology. This final turn is less popularly known because his earlier phase jives better with today’s preoccupations with the driving force of personal experiences. Freud saw an underlying and hardwired tendency for humans to invest in group identity. Although he observed that we ostensibly discard this desire when we take on ambitious or aggressive alpha roles, he still believed that we remained forever susceptible to the group's appeal.

Ian Davis’s current body of work reflects these late interests of Freud. There is a high thrill and a deep danger in turning your identity over the crowd. By thickly covering this work with ambiguity, the piece captures how the jury is still out deliberating this tradeoff.