Gravity and Grace: Slide Projections of Christine Davis, 1991 - 2003

September 26 - January 5, 2007
Organized by KW|AG in co-operation with Presentation House (Vancouver)

Public Opening: Thursday October 5, 2006, 7 - 9 p.m.

This exhibition marks the largest mounting of Christine Davis's time-based works to date. Davis creates a cinematic experience of complexity by projecting moving images onto screens that are made of upholstery, feathers, and butterfly wings.

Christine Davis, Installation view of Logos, 1991. Image courtesy of the artist and KW|AG. Photo: K.J. Bedford.

Davis's work invites visitors to consider the pursuit of knowledge and the nebulous territory between binaries. In Logos, the first of Davis's large screen projection works, a satin upholstered surface serves as a screen for a static projection from the film Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975) by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Logos, like the works that have followed it, invite us to consider the notion that fetish and commodity are inextricably linked.

Pluck presents us with film frames of a trapeze artist projected onto a suspended screen of black feathers. She twirls as the trapeze act unfolds through a series of slide dissolves that animate the surface in discreet mechanized movement.  In her essay featured in the exhibition catalogue, Janine Marchessault states "it is precisely the control of that 'split second' timing that makes the routine work. No room is left for error and the woman's body is transformed into a clock."

In Tlön, or How I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet's entire history, images of a sparkling cosmic landscape gently move over a grid of blue Morpho butterflies. Borrowing its title from one of the unusual, labyrinthine fables by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön evokes ideas of chaotic consequences registered at both a micro and macro level. Our focus shifts between the intimate beauty of the Morpho butterfly and the vertiginous, intangible limits of the universe. In this work as well as the others featured in the exhibition, Davis simultaneously refers to the sensual and the abstract, the ephemeral and the permanent, the human and the inhuman.

An online exhibition catalogue organized in cooperation with Presentation House Gallery (Vancouver) features essays by esteemed contributors Helga Pakasaar, Janine Marchessault, and Barry Schwabsky.