Lisa Corinne Davis

Davis's early mixed-media work used visual analogies to examine race, the quest for individual identity, and distinctions between self and other, individual and group.[22][21][27] This work included ink self-portraits—which she covered with graphite, leaving only ghostly figural images below semi-reflective surfaces—and wall pieces and objects that combined raw construction with delicate painted imagery.[26][6][27][22] Essential Traits No. 1 (1996) was a representative early work, constructed out of pages from an old American history text, overwritten with new text that conveyed the constraints on identity posed by racially derived cultural assumptions.[23]

In solo shows at June Kelly (1998), Lehman College (2001) and Marlborough Gallery (2003), Davis produced obsessive, elaborately layered collage-style works that wedded modernist abstraction and postmodern content.[28][29][30] They were created out of hundreds of variable elements taken from magazines, novels and history books: multiracial headshots, cutouts of eyes, multicultural alphabet signs, maps and fingerprints, reproduced in a palette approximating a range of skin tones.[28][29] She combined them into large, quilt- or chart-like compositions that abstracted systems of categorization while blurring reductive labels in favor of an individualistic view of social complexity.[31][32][33][12] New York Times critic Ken Johnson wrote that this work "meditated with poetic indirection on race, culture, history and geography,"[28] while Holland Cotter described it as a blend of "pointed information and good-looking painting."[29]

Lisa Corinne Davis, Doodle Verité, oil on panel, 30" x 22", 2007.

In the 2000s, Davis staked out an increasingly abstract and fluid position in canvases that resembled maps or networks and explored systemic, documentary and narrative impulses.[1][6][8] Situated more purely in painting, they dispensed with collage elements but retained that aesthetic through a dense layering of imagery and techniques.[1][6] Davis approached subject matter in a more subtle, open-ended manner balanced with formal concerns, expanding earlier examinations of racial, gender and identity codes into evocations of wider knowledge systems, often revealed as contingent and futile in terms of their ability to capture the plurality of life.[5][34][7][1]

The paintings in her show "Fact & Fiction" (June Kelly, 2007) combined skeins of curling lines, flat cartoonish shapes, and passages of spilled or squeezed paint, layered over backgrounds of blue, white, and green squares.[1][6] The lines suggested skewed latitude and longitude grids or organic webs, while the flat shapes resembled landmasses or plant, insect and anatomical forms, accumulating details suggesting the technical and the handmade (e.g., Mutant Schema, 2006; Doodle Verité, 2007).[1][6] Davis painted them with an eye-catching, sometimes artificial palette that departed from the more somber earth and flesh tones of her past work; at times, the color emitted an unsettling or poisonous aura, evoking burst corpuscles, cellular malignancies, fire or lethal sludge, as with the feverish, red-orange smears and shapes in works such as Verifiably Metaphysical and Regulatory Plasma (both 2007).[1][6] Art in America 's Lilly Wei wrote, Davis's "riddled maps seem both familiar and not, suggesting aerial views of enigmatic terrain, details of a landscape in toxic erosion … an updated War of the Worlds [schema] or a blueprint of our ecological madness."[1]

In exhibitions between 2010 and 2017—at Lesley Heller, Spanierman Modern, Galerie Gris and Gerald Peters (New York), Zolla/Lieberman (Chicago), and Mayor Gallery (London)—Davis extended the complexity of her themes and abstract syntaxes.[3][35][36][37] Her proliferating forms—seemingly drawn from microscopic and macroscopic realms (cells, roads, maps, city grids, geographic fault lines), as well as the mechanical world of circuits and motherboards—charted concepts encompassing the urban experience of space and time, the fragmentation of contemporary life, and the diverse, intersecting strands of identity.[5][3] Critics described them as "haphazardly rendered topographies or warped atlas pages"[3] delicately balanced between organic chaos and linear order, whose titles (e.g., Psychopathic Territory and Psychotropic Turf, both 2015) undermined their reliability as maps.[5] Joan Waltemath suggested these ideas were offset by humor and irreverence, expressed through Davis's use of outline as a kind of doodling gesture in works such as Flim Flam Plan (2015).[5]

Reviews identified a deliberate, increasingly unstable quality of collapse or collision in the paintings in Davis's show "All Shook Up" (Pamela Salisbury, 2020).[2][26][7] Its fifteen vertically oriented, vibrant works combined warped and decomposing grids, puzzle-like shapes, abutting planes and linear bands, placed in off-balance, syncopated rhythms and depthless space.[7][2] Critics such as John Yau and Karen Wilkin suggested that their visual schemas and intentionally elusive titles (Registered Impersonation, 2020; Captious Computation, 2019) summoned a range of contradictory associations—natural to man-made, ephemeral and organic to technological—as well as allusions to corporate and governmental intrusion into private life. Yau wrote, "the artist’s ability to call forth the invisible world, in which we are constantly leaving traces of our presence, injects an unexpected and much-needed jolt into abstraction"; Wilkin suggested the paintings evoked "the long views inherent in mapping and the intimacy of textiles."[2][7]