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Images from "Tlön, or how I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet's entire history" (2003)
Artist website
Christine Davis is Artist in Residence at Future Cinema Lab. Davis has long pursued an installation based practice that, while it eschews easy commercial 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. They are also influential, having engaged many of the key issues at the centre of recent developments in contemporary art.
Davis has proven she is capable time and again of producing ambitious exhibitions of great potency and sophistication. Interweaving technologies old and new, the range of her conceptual and material exploration is, following the lead of Michael Snow—an artist she greatly admires—unusually innovative: words laser etched onto contact lenses, genetic code sewn into armor and her extraordinary slide dissolves that combine analogue optics with digital control.
Davis is no stranger to the international art world. While she has shown at art fairs such as Art Basel and Art Forum Berlin, her most potent contributions have been within the context of museum and gallery exhibitions in Canada and abroad. She has been included in many group exhibitions that reveal the range of her concerns, from the exhibition “Embodying Faith” at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1991, to the upcoming “Imagining Science” at the Art Gallery of Alberta. She has been included in international biennales such as “Prospect 1993” at the Frankfurter Kunstverein and most recently “Crack the Sky” in Montreal, 2007, and has been the subject of important one person exhibitions including those organized by Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; The Power Plant, Toronto; CREDEC Paris; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Art Gallery of Ontario; Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery, and upcoming at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Her work is in public and private collections nationally and internationally. She has served on the board of directors of YYZ and the Power Plant, Toronto.
Davis has also long been involved in contemporary art’s discourses, principally as a founding editor of the international journal Public: Art/Culture/Ideas. Her editorial work intersects with the interests driving her practice—for example her translation of significant texts in continental philosophy by women theorists such as Sarah Kofman and Christine Buci-Glucksmann, while residing in Paris from 1984 to 1994, or the issue of Public she edited, “Sacred Technologies,” which was subsequently included on a course list for MIT.
Her work engages and extends feminist investigations in contemporary practice, an area of current critical attention, as evidenced by exhibitions such as “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution.” 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, “Image and reality interfuse….Where the awareness of the construction of image reinforces physical presence, the suggestion of something unconscious, the dream-state, is entirely in keeping with Davis’s slide dissolves. It is this dynamic that she makes so vivid, this interaction on the skin of the screen.”
Currently Davis is working on a project "Unanimous Horizon," a project that continues her exploration on the materiality of the screen. Combining Morpho butterflies, archival footage of the nineteenth century dancer Loïe Fuller, and an early nineteenth century hand coloured book ofEuclid's Elements, the work will explore the relation between geography, geometry, and choreography. Fuller is the perfect encapsulation of Davis's approach to the digital ecologies of projected images—she was the first dancer to copyright her choreographies for electric light. For Davis, Fuller is a tragic hero who foreshadows the mobility and ephemerality of the image saturated culture of the twenty-first century, as well as the conflation of the screen and femininity which is endemic to modernity. Fuller's actions to gain copyright over the distribution of her images and choreography was a response to these new forms of distribution enabled through electricity—this foreshadows the astronomical problems of copyright in the digital age.
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