BIOGRAPHY

Encompassing a wide variety of techniques–photography, slide projection, sculpture, installation and collage— the work of artist Christine Davis investigates language, time and wonder. Her work is well represented in public collections, notably in her native Canada, and she has exhibited widely and regularly since 1987. Born in Vancouver into a family of peripatetic scientists, Christine Davis has been at home in six cities on three continents. She also roams with ease through the worlds of philosophy, literature, and history, as well as the broad fields of scientific investigation and material culture. Animated by “a cosmological impulse,” she proposes new forms of knowledge that are not created according to a system, but rather “emerge from a process of metamorphosis and transformation.” Davis characterizes her works as “machines for thinking;” they are conceived to eventually escape the apparatus of artistic control.

Harnessing the metaphoric capacity of light Davis’ artistic practice resists formal categorization while maintaining a consistently exploratory material process.  In “Machines for Thinking,” a 2015 interview she gave to Asymptote, the artist describes her creative process of “staging of collisions between contrasting ways of knowing and speaking as ‘speculative infection.’ The artist roams among literature, philosophy, history, and the sciences. Often using the rhetorical devices or tools of one system or imaginary world to interrogate another…to explore experiences of the incommensurable, and wonder as a radical force.” According to Davis, magic, in its purest sense as the active production of wonder, is both her subject and her method.

An example of such a “machine” is her work Tlön, or How I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet’s entire history. First exhibited at the Musée de Beaux Arts de Montréal (2003), the slide projection onto a screen of Morpho butterflies overlays documentation of the heavens upon a classification of wildlife in a joint symmetrical order that is at once “mystical and sadistic, absurd and universal.” As art critic Barry Schwabsky writes “the suggestion of of something unconscious, the dream-state, is entirely in keeping with Davis’ slide dissolves. It is this dynamic she makes so vivid, this interaction on the skin of the screen.” Another example was created for the milestone exhibition Press/Enter: Between Seduction and Disbelief, a show about emerging interactive technologies organized in 1995 by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto. Le dictionnaire des inquisiteurs (tombeau) presents 308 contact lenses upon which Davis has etched words. Working with lasers developed for Canadarm—a series of robotic arms used on the Space Shuttle orbiters “to deploy, manoeuver and capture payloads”—the work links the Spanish Inquisition to the emergence of televised trials in an exploration of what French philosopher Christine Buci-Glucksmann calls “the lens or film-screen upon which is condensed the trauma of history.”

In 2000, Davis participated in the touring exhibition Paradise Now: Creating the Genetic Revolution organized by Exit Art in New York. Working with her brother, a molecular biologist,  she produced a series of garments that link genetics and information theory. During her residency at York University’s Future Cinema Lab, she created Satellite Ballet (for Loie Fuller), an animated short designed for cell phones; it was presented in 2009 by the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. In the exhibition catalogue, film scholar Olivier Asselin notes: “Davis’ work establishes a link between artistic abstraction and scientific abstraction—between formal abstraction and conceptual abstraction. Form is chaotic; it is one of those complex phenomena, like climate change and liquid turbulence, that 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.” 

After graduating from York University in Toronto (BFA 1984) she attended the newly formed Collège international de philosophie in Paris (1984-1987). Davis served on the board of directors of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (2002-2008) and, also in Toronto, on the board of YYZ Artists' Outlet (1989-1993). She co-founded Border/Lines magazine (1984-1986) with fellow students of radical sociologist Ioan Davies (York University, Social and Politic Thought). With Janine Marchessault, in 1986 she went on to cofound the interdisciplinary journal Public: Art/Culture/Ideas. Her ongoing editorial work for Public intersects with the research driving her practice. In 2014, Davis joined CIBER (Centre for Integrative Bio-Engineering Research) at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver to explore nano-optics. Christine Davis lives and works in Toronto and New York.

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 Muse d’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).