Lisa Corinne Davis, 1958, USA
Artist Statement:
Pandemic Logistics.
“Stemming from my own experience as an African American woman of mixed heritage, my work has been an exploration of the divisions and relationships between contemporary ethnic groups. Signs, representations, and abstractions reveal themselves in implied geography, cartoonish shapes, exoskeletal forms, spores, cancer cells, flora, fauna, and so on. Size, shape, and color function to shift and ultimately disrupt the viewer’s perceived ability to conclude that a form is fixed and nameable as perhaps an insect larvae, a piece of candy, an environmental contamination, or some other recognizable object. The impulse to identify and label the forms, and to force a system into the visual disorder in order to create a tidy, decisive, pictorial sense, becomes impossible as the viewer gives in to the realization that his or her decision making is a shifting, contingent interpretation of the visual information presented. Ultimately, these paintings reveal the extent to which our labels and fictions create an artificial simplicity, which guards a more complex and meaningful truth.”
Erroneous Diagram, 2015.
Mutant Schema.
Regulatory Plasma 1.
“Lisa Corinne Davis’ paintings occupy a point somewhere between cartooning and cartography, abstraction and figuration. Her carefully articulated images are oddly familiar but essentially ephemeral, visually resonant but also deliberately enigmatic. Davis’ subject has always been the exploration of racial, social, and psychological identity. She has developed her own vocabulary for rendering the world, a lexicon that expresses her personal experience as an African-American woman in the 21st Century, and, by extension, that of an individual in modern society. While subtly avoiding the clichés of special identity politics—if anything, challenging them—Davis provides the viewer with an evocative visual code for deciphering his own environment. The resulting pieces are a bit like Rorschach tests: their meaning is in the eye of the beholder. The spectator completes the loop, projecting his or her subjective reality onto the images: art by free (or maybe not so free) association.” (P. Hoban) (text website Hunter College)