Lisa Corinne Davis “You Are Here?”

Lisa Corinne Davis “You Are Here?”

Miles McEnery Gallery

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525 W 22nd

Miles McEnery Gallery presents You Are Here?, Lisa Corinne Davis’ inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery.

Over the course of three decades, New York based artist Lisa Corinne Davis’ paintings have transcended—or, more accurately, rejected—the labels of abstraction. While sparking initial connotations of grids and maps, the works deny the rigidity of categorization; instead viewers arrive before her compositions with their own perceptions and identities, drawn to discover their own conclusions.

The exhibition title, You Are Here?, uses language to pave the way throughout the body of work. While the words alone imply a pinpointed orientation, the punctuation upends that assurance, presenting a question to be explored. Davis’ paintings, large in scale and rendered precisely in oil, further prime this notion of disorientation. Intersecting planes cover the canvases, populated by cartographic grids, warped lines, and amoebic waves. Titles like Tricky Track and Phony Position heighten the works’ destabilizing nature.

To experience the paintings as Davis intends is to lean into the disorientation. Accepting that the works cannot be confined into stringent bounds, the viewer is prompted to rid themselves of automatic associations. Instead, one’s multifaceted lived experiences and intersectional identity provide a wavering guide to navigate with.

As Anita N. Bateman, Ph.D. elaborates, “Davis understands that we are programmed to think in adjacencies, to find and filter through the connective tissues of our subjective experiences and observable nature. Her works are about bodies (the experiences of bodies, of subjects) as much as they are about contexts. It is no wonder that the paintings anatomize the degree to which we are controlled by the social and cultural contexts that structure our understanding, and stymied by the language that cannot account for things we have yet to experience.”

Lisa Corinne Davis (b.1958 in Baltimore, MD) holds a Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College, New York, NY and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute, New York, NY. Since 1993, Davis has held teaching positions at some of the most prestigious art schools in the United States, and is currently the Co-MFA Director at Hunter College. She is a member of the National Academy of Design and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in the Fine Arts.

She has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY; Esther Massry Gallery, College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY; Galerie Gris, Hudson, NY; Farmer Family Gallery at Ohio State University, Lima; and Gerald Peters Gallery, New York, NY.

Davis’ work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous institutions including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; Dieu Donné Papermill, New York, NY; Flint Institute of The Arts, Flint, MI; Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY; Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, NY; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; New York Studio School, New York, NY; Schloss Plüschow, Uphal, Germany; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY; and the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE, among others.

Her work may be found in the collections of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; Beinecke Collection, Yale University, New Haven, CT; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; New York Public Library, New York, NY; Philadelphia Museum, Philadelphia, PA; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom, and elsewhere.

The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

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