The straight-backed chair appears over and over again, in isolation: on a freeway overpass, on the bank of a canal in the Yolo Bypass, under a graffiti-streaked concrete wall, on railroad tracks, on an expanse of parched soil riven with cracks, in front of an abandoned car next to a fallow field. Images fade in and out on the screen with metronomic precision, as if timed to the beat of a heart. “Each of us will sit in many chairs,” reads the text on interstitial title cards, “…but few are as misunderstood as the grateful chair.” The grateful chair, artist Dave Webb’s solo exhibit that runs from Oct. 1 to Nov. 1 at the Pence Gallery in Davis, is a meditation on loss, gratitude and redemption, a series of words and iPhone images, both still and moving. Set to music by Webb (whom Rolling Stone  rock critic Anthony DeCurtis once called “provocative and poetic … and well worth keeping an eye on” in his syndicated newspaper column), the show chronicles his wife Melinda Welsh’s yearslong battle with head and neck cancer, beginning with her diagnosis in 2014. What, exactly, is a grateful chair? Objectively, it is a chair from Webb and Welsh’s Davis dining room. But it also represents a seat at the table of life, one we occupy for however long the feast lasts. “It could be occupied: a place of reflection, a place of witness, fear, sadness,” Webb explains. “Or it could be empty—an empty chair suggests a lot of things immediately. But I wanted it to be a layered metaphor, because if there’s one thing about both gratitude and grief, it’s that they’re largely unique. They have similar contours from person to person, but they’re unique.” The exhibition—which also consists of nearly three dozen still photographs, some accompanied by displays of text to form a trail for gallery visitors to follow—centers on a multimedia video in which the paradoxical interplay between grief and gratitude swells and ebbs in time with the rise and swell of piano movements written and performed by Webb. Most shots were taken in Yolo County. Some are starkly photographic, somepainterly, some elegiac, some funny. (Was that a chicken crossing a road? Why, yes it was.) Sometimes Welsh appears, seated in the chair and facing away from us. At one point, Webb’s own face appears, blurred and obscured by text. She is disappearing in one direction, and that is erasing part of Webb’s identity, as he is unable to go with her. The show also examines Webb’s experience of anticipatory loss. Welsh’s diagnosis was already terminal in the summer of 2015 when doctors explained that the tumor in her cheek had spread rapidly to her neck, and they now knew this was the thing that would ultimately take her life. “The oncologist basically said, ‘This is good news for you, Melinda, because when the tumor grows into your carotid artery, blood will come out of your mouth and your nose, and you will die peacefully in three or four minutes. And there’s nothing we can do right now to stop that growth. It’s a good death. It’s peaceful. It’s quick. It’s not painful.’ ” Webb says. “Then he turns to me and says, ‘But it’ll be harder on you.’ It was this—driving right up to the edge of the cliff of widowhood—that is informing the grateful chair.” In Abandoned, “the grateful chair” sits in a Yolo County agricultural field in front of a discarded vehicle. (Photo by Dave Webb) Webb came to synthesize his way of seeing and creating by dint of the same false starts and wrong turns down artistic cul-de-sacs that frustrate so many creatives. He met Welsh, then a budding writer, activist and musician, while both were students at UC Davis in the 1970s, and for him, it was love at first sight, although he had to wait around a bit for her to break up with a boyfriend. “I first noticed her in a short story class,” he says. “She was a visible figure on the UC Davis campus: She would perform as a guitarist; she was active in progressive politics.” They married in 1982. For the next decade, Webb lived the struggling musician life. “I started out being a pretty serious alt-rock guy,” he says. By the early ’90s, he had written roughly 200 songs, recorded, and played in various bands, achieving a modicum of success, if never quite earning a living. He also launched what would become a decades-long career by taking a job as the Davis Food Co-op’s first marketing director. “I ran dry as a songwriter and burned out on the life,” he says. A few years after Welsh became the founding editor of the Sacramento News & Review  in 1989, Webb took a job as marketing director for UC Davis Presents (later renamed the Mondavi Center). Eventually, Webb replaced music with fiction writing as his creative outlet. “Three novels later, no representation, no publishing,” he says. In time, he burned out on that pursuit as well. “But I learned a lot about the written word,” he says. Then, in 2009, Welsh gave Webb an iPhone, which sparked fresh creative impulses, in a way that was at first completely casual and lighthearted. “I became captured by the camera,” he says. “I posted a picture every day on Facebook and got the community commenting. It sounds quaint now, but at the time it seemed bold.” In 2013, the Tsao Gallery in Davis contacted him, and he held his first exhibit there, quickly followed by another display at Little Relics in Sacramento, and multiple group shows the following year at venues like Davis’ John Natsoulas Gallery. On its way to the Pence, the grateful chair  has shown at the Grand Theatre Center for the Arts in Tracy, and the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton. In 2017 Webb was working on a series grappling with Welsh’s cancer, which he shared with Natalie Nelson, the director and curator of Pence Gallery. “I was blown away,” she says. Having recently lost a close friend, Nelson also happened to be in the midst of reading Sacramento native Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking  as part of her own healing process. “Art can lift us out for a moment, and sometimes that’s what we need—respite from that grief. It was something I had never shown before and something I was passionate about, which is art as a form of healing.” Before the exhibit discussion could go any further, however, the artist demurred. Welsh was scheduled for another surgery. Maybe another time, he told Nelson. When they spoke again, several years later, life and art had taken an unexpected turn: By late 2018, Welsh’s advanced cancer had responded completely to a sequence of immunotherapy treatments and surgeries. She was suddenly and remarkably cancer-free. (Shortly thereafter, she wrote a cover essay on her cancer journey, “The Big Sick,” for Sactown.) And in 2021, Webb started on a new series, the grateful chair, an even more nuanced and complex piece of storytelling. Now there was a happy ending—but is there such a thing? We are all mortal, and will all be confronted by grief, so whether it takes part in the past, present or future, the truths are eternal. The grateful chair is “part love note, part meditation on mortality and part unsolicited advice,” says Webb, pictured at home in Davis with his wife, Melinda Welsh, and their dog, Scout. (Photo by Smeeta Mahanti) Webb, 68, describes the grateful chair  as “part love note, part meditation on mortality and part unsolicited advice.” It started as a poetic flash of inspiration, a script that he wrote out in one sitting. Excited, he soon set out to secure proof of concept that the vision in his mind’s eye would work. “I go downstairs, I grab a dining room chair, throw it in the car, start taking photographs,” he recalls. Webb also then chose a novel way of displaying the images. The photos are printed on metal, ink infused into the top layer of the metal in a process akin to tattooing. The result is at once vivid and ethereal, permanent and ghostly, like the emotions being portrayed. “I’m calling it a multimedia slide song,” Webb says. “The fact that he did video, music, writing and photos—he just attacks this issue from so many levels,” Nelson says. “It wasn’t going to be a traditional photography show, because he’s not a traditional guy.” In addition to the photographs and video installation, the chair itself will be on view at the Pence Gallery, so viewers can experience its numinous evocations of presence and absence in person. For them, it won’t be Melinda Welsh who is or isn’t sitting in that chair, but someone else—a husband, wife, mother, father, child, friend. Someone, living or not, the loss of whom it is infinitely difficult to contemplate. But with Webb’s help, perhaps we can—because the grateful chair  is the kind of work that makes artists of us all. A slide in the multimedia presentation shows Welsh, seated in the chair, back to the camera, her gray hair spilling over her shoulders. “Still, she sits in the grateful chair with everything she has to lose,” the title card reads. The time of loss may come again someday, but for now, the couple will be gathered at the dining room table drinking in many laughter-filled moments. “Whenever I have an exhibit, we’re minus a chair in the dining room,” Webb says with a cheerful shrug. “When we have guests over, I sit on the floor.”