Tim Davis: Upstate Event Horizon

 

This statement by artist, educator, and writer Tim Davis affirms his belief in active image-making, something he has done consistently since the early 1990s. Davis’s photographs revel in surfaces and qualities of color and light, and he is a skillful chronicler of how everyday endeavors and conditions can be captured by the camera. Davis gives himself challenging projects, such as his decades-long visual poem, “I’m Looking Through You,” with its mix of commercial signage, insects, machinery, sunsets, and diverse citizens at work and leisure.

 

Here at the Museum, he presents Upstate Event Horizon, an installation/event where viewers can touch, arrange, and rearrange a selection of his unframed color prints laid out on a table that wraps the gallery, making their own combinations and sequences. Should the skinny boy looking at a rainbow go next to the closeup of the waterfall or the woman taking a photo of cattle? This decision-making activity mimics Davis’s own experience in designing the pace and juxtaposition of images in his exemplary photo books.

 

Davis earned his BA from Bard College in 1991 and currently teaches there as Associate Professor of Photography. His work has been exhibited widely and his photographs are in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, and the Walker Art Center, to name a few. His art writing has appeared in publications including Aperture, Blind Spot, Bomb, and Cabinet.

 

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