Christine Davis

"Through a cosmological impulse and experimental process her work collides diverse historical materials and technologies."Her time-based work with slide dissolve is often described as haptic; enfolding screen, viewing space and projection apparatus within the sensory experience. Exploration of the image support is uniquely addressed in her work with sculptural screens constructed of butterflies, buttons, flowers, lead and upholstery. As poet and art critic Barry Schwabsky describes, "Image and reality interfuse… [t]he awareness of the construction 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."

Davis’ installations seem to propose that meanings from disparate historical and pedagogical contexts overlap and are released slowly over long periods of time. At its core, as film scholar Olivier Asselin has noted, "Davis’ work establishes a link between artistic abstraction and scientific abstraction— between formal abstraction and conceptual abstraction. [F]orm is chaotic; it is one of those complex phenomena, like climate change and liquid turbulence, which are determinate, but non-linear, and, as a result, remain largely unpredictable. As such, it prompts an epistemological reflection on the complexity of the sensible and the limits of the concept… from this perspective, her work is archaeological."

In her catalogue essay, “Configurations of the Gaze” philosopher Christine Buci-Glucksmann suggests, "To work violence, in its extreme moments, be it that of the Inquisition or of fascism as in Pasolini’s Salò, then to dissimulate that violence within visual and conceptual apparatuses which neutralize it through a perverse and cool disordering: such is the initial paradox of Christine Davis’ artistic “scenario,” a practice which seeks to capture what, after Pasolini, I would call the “form of the gaze”… [i]t is as if shedding light on violence required an archeology of the image in order that its cruelty, its social effect, be revealed, thus allowing the spectator to discover its implications. Drawn from different regimes — cinema, photography, books — the images function as a kind of palimpsest or abstract… “capturing devices” through whose cold, technological eyes the blindness of the modern is alleviated."

L’dictionaire des inquisiteurs (1992)

An installation of 12 light tables whose surfaces illuminate words laser etched on contact lenses. The words are taken from the index of a dictionary published in Valencia during the Spanish inquisition. Mapped into a new historical relation by the operation of chance and prosthetic appearance the index appears vividly modern. The contact lens becomes a skin-film on which the trauma of history is condensed—linking truth to the production of the visual. This work was first exhibited at Olga Korper gallery in Toronto and has travelled extensively to other venues including Kunsthalle Bielefeld.

Tlön, or How I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet’s entire history (2003)

Commissioned by the Muse de Beaux Art de Montreal. The work is based on a Borges story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius,” which recounts the invention of a virtual cosmos, Uqbar, and its idealized knowledge system called Tlön, attributed to "the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia." A dissolve sequence of 24 astronomy slides is projected onto a suspended screen of Morpho butterflies pinned into a grid. Documentation of the heavens and classification of wildlife are overlaid in a system of ordering and symmetry that is at once mystical and sadistic, absurd and universal.

As if his throat opened into the void of stars (2010)

"As if his throat opened into the void of stars" is a video installation. A video projector, clamped to a brass stripper pole, projects onto a sculpted screen of diamond dust. The work was commissioned by the “Future Cinema Lab” in Toronto where Davis inaugurated their residency program. The work layers footage of volcanic eruption with pole dancing through a symbiotic digital interface.(6) It was first shown at Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto and has appeared in other venues including New York’s Lumen Festival.

World Without Sun (2012)

A six channel video projection on satellite dishes, 5 min. loop. The work was commissioned by Nuit Blanche Toronto and toured to other venues including Melbourne’s “White Night” in 2014. “World Without Sun” was titled after Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle’s underwater documentary of the first sea colony. In Davis’ rendition the underwater world collides with exterior forces such as planes, stars and protest in an attempt to grapple with the radical interdependencies of life on this planet.

Exhibiting since 1987 public venues include; Frankfurter Kunstverein, The Power Plant (Toronto), Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal, Musée de beaux arts de Montreal, Art Gallery of Ontario, Vancouver Art Gallery, Kunsthalle Munich, Haus am Waldsee (Berlin), Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Seoul Museum of Art, New Museum (New York), Presentation House (Vancouver), Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (Ottawa), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Art Gallery of Winnipeg, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Tang Teaching Museum (New York), Carnegie Mellon University, Art Metropole (Toronto), Le Confort Moderne (Poitiers), Victoria and Albert Museum, and Exit Art (New York). Her work is held in numerous collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Le Mused’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Collection Helga de Alvear and the Yvon Lambert Collection Avignon. Publications on her work include monographs published by CREDAC (Paris), MACM (Montreal), AGO (Toronto) and Presentation House (Vancouver).