Christine Davis
Tlön (3-6-9) , 2003

cibachrome prints (triptych)
Image dimensions 27.9 x 35.6 each
Edition 1/5
Courtesy the artist and Olga Korper Gallery

ESTIMATE $4,000 - $5,000

Toronto artist Christine Davis was born in Vancouver in 1962 and is a graduate of York University. Her mixed media installations have been exhibited extensively across Canada and abroad since the mid 1980s. Her most recent project is in the 2007 Montréal Biennial. She is also a founding editor of the journal, Public. Since 1990, Davis has developed a unique form of projection whereby slide sequences are projected onto material screens creating a spectacular effect that the artist calls “a thickening of the image.” The mottled images fusing figure and ground are in a perpetual state of flux morphing between reflective surface and sculptural presence. The screens for each piece have been comprised of buttons, coque feathers, butterfly wings, or plastic flowers, as in the work, Drink Me, that was shown at Presentation House Gallery in 2005. This tryptch is based on Davis’s 2003 slide dissolve installation Tlon, or How I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet’s entire history, based on astronomy slides, which is in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal. These photographs of Morpho didius butterflies suggest a type of narrative of transformation, similar to that of the effect of the slide dissolves. The richly coloured, reflective quality of cibachrome prints amplifies the artists’ concern with seductive surfaces. As critic Barry Schwabsky has described in the PHG catalogue on Davis’s slide projections, “What Davis shows through dissolve is that even the still image is in movement”.