Indie Memphis 2011

Almost thirty years ago, a peg-legged artist and motorcycle mechanic from Mississippi walked into MITs Center for Advanced Visual Studies and demanded a meeting with the Director. Forty-five minutes later, after trashing the receptionist's desk and holding off the Cambridge police, Joe Davis walked out with an academic appointment at MIT.

His status there has provided him with resources for much of his work - including sending vaginal contractions into space to communicate with aliens, poetry encoded into DNA, and a language to write the world beneath the world.

It's a great life for a man driven by his imagination, except when it's not. His gig at MIT is unpaid. He gets evicted from several apartments and loses his lab space to science.

But perhaps his greatest obstacle is that people refuse to understand him. He is claimed by neither the Art nor Scientific communities. His uncompromising approach to art and life spawns conflicts in his personal life and hinders his ability to address the everyday world's banal requirements. To Joe, it's more important to try to discover man's place in the cosmos.

Working with home movies, drawings, and verite and interview footage, HEAVEN + EARTH + JOE DAVIS takes the viewer with Joe around the world and into the visual and philosophical landscape of his art. It is a story of self-discovery, sacrifice, and the complexity of human endeavor, constructed around a theme central to his work; that everything is connected, often in the most unexpected ways.