Christine Davis has long pursued an installation based practice that, while it eschews easy stylist classification, has resulted in a range of highly evocative and influential works. Her slide projection based installations and photo works are intellectually demanding, yet simultaneously resonate on visual, visceral and material levels. Interweaving technologies old and new, the range of her conceptual and material exploration is, following the lead of Michael Snow, unusually innovative: words laser etched onto contact lenses, genetic code sewn into armor and her extraordinary slide dissolves onto material screens that combine analogue optics with digital control.
Davis has also long been involved in contemporary art's discourses, principally as a founding editor of the international journal Public. Her editorial work intersects with the interests driving her practice - for example her translating of significant texts in continental philosophy by women theorists such as Sara Kofmann and Christine Buci-Glucksmann, while residing in Paris from 1984 to 1994.
At its core, her work addresses the conception and representation of the body at key and transformative moments in the history of modernism, from the nineteenth century, through to the current moment. It draws on highly wrought histories of visuality and explores the interconnections of such histories to mechanistic, technological and scientific cultures as well as concepts of the divine. As Art Forum critic Barry Schwabsky has noted, $quot;Image and reality interfuse... the awareness of the construction of image reinforces physical presence, the suggestion of something unconscious, the dream-state, is entirely in keeping with Christine Davis' slide dissolves. It is this dynamic that she makes so vivid, this interaction on the skin of the screen."