SUBJECTIVE TRUTHS

By Anita N. Bateman, Ph.D.

An examination of Lisa Corinne Davis’s multidirectional paintings makes it clear that her intentions, which are neither attached to categorization nor designed to control viewers’ interpretations, are at the confluence of taxonomic negation. Davis has no attachments to labels; in fact she finds them meaningless. Instead, she feels compelled to translate the layers of sociocultural experiences, and the ways in which the viewer potentially navigates them, with little regard for fixity. Although her oil-based compositions are often described as “abstract,” they firmly cohere around the experiences of the viewer—to whom they are directed and for whom meaning is revealed through personal associations. The works employ categorical slippage that exposes the shortcomings of the language we use to describe them: To designate the works as “abstract” reinscribes the essentialist frameworks that the artist has abandoned. The difficulty with comprehending these visual forms outside of structured schema like the grid, the map, and the cell—and difficulty with the abstract label itself—seems entirely the point, which leaves the viewer to wonder how meaning is created, suggested, maneuvered, and ultimately codified.

The artist has a diagnostic concern with how her works are perceived. As a body of work, the paintings suggest a type of cartographical orientation or aerial perspective in their seeming appropriation of maps. But they are not maps, which, in their measured certainty, are regarded as factual, even infallible. These works have no map-like claim to pinpointing locations: Davis has ways of formally disrupting that expectation through gestural and dense linework. Instead, as “inventive geographies,” the paintings help to uncover the subjective truths of viewers, which are mediated by the viewing experience. In that way, the distance between constructing a map and the more conceptual proposition of mapping identity is bridged. Above all, the works maintain the primacy of positionality, through which meaning is inferred: We are asked to draw from our intersectional experiences of race, sexuality, gender, and class to bring awareness to our processes of decision-making. Are we subsequently challenged in our associations and memories of past events? Do these works affirm the various positions we hold and spaces we occupy? These are the questions we begin to unpack when viewing the paintings, which are ultimately derived from two-dimensional shapes and forms. Because the works are ambiguous, we lean on the cognitive recognition of pattern, and pattern is construed from narratives that derive from our preconceived notions. In other words, to engage with these paintings is to wrestle with the phenomenological.

You Are Here? is the inaugural solo exhibition of Davis’s paintings at Miles McEnery Gallery. It presents eleven works created over the course of 2022 and early 2023. The paintings share a common language of tessellation, but each is discreet in its vivid treatment of color, geometry, and asymmetry. Davis, who works on multiple canvases at the same time, compares the process with becoming acquainted with people; she initiates a type of dialogic metamorphosis from idea to materiality while mediating the works’ different “personalities.” So too, do the works also converse among themselves and across time, showing the influence of modern art and retaining modern art’s disruptive and experimental spirit. Although dependent on a more intuitively based approach, the works also bring to mind the sociological objectives encompassed by W.E.B. Du Bois’s data visualizations whose significance in modernist abstraction is irrefutable.1 To depict the conditions of Black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, Du Bois turned to images and, in a sense, to art, to quantify statistics and distill the empirical data that he and his team of Atlanta University students presented at the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Those infographics—informed by the research of a network of experts— relied on design, detail, and aesthetics. Through saturated hues and arresting, illustrative compositions, audiences abroad gained insights into the political and social factors that determined the circumstances and even decided the lives of African Americans of the time. But where Du Bois gave diagrammatic form to existing realities, Davis limns imagined realities and their possibilities as precepts to deconstruct the many facets of identity.

The open-ended nature of the phrase You Are Here? semantically anticipates the questions raised by and in the exhibition. In syntax that simultaneously blurs and distinguishes the declarative from the interrogative, we are prompted to conceptually orient ourselves. Or rather, we are encouraged to adapt to the uneasiness that accompanies speculation. Notably, the exhibition serves to reinforce notions of instability by encouraging us to question where exactly here is; the journey toward “here” is perhaps in uncharted territory. Davis’s painting titles are descriptive in the same way, and they nudge the viewer toward free association. Culling from separate lists of words—one psychologically driven, the other more rational—the titles, sometimes alliterative, capture the imagination. They appear as contradictions, and they not only ask us to discern fact from fiction (or the subjective from the objective), but to discern the overlaps between opposing, semiotic poles.

Measuring 70 x 55 inches, Episodic Precision (2023) exhibits the type of undulatory locomotion that is common to Davis’s canvases. Seemingly divided into three correlative sections, the painting, like its counterparts in the exhibition, compels observational curiosity that is driven by the impulse to find related components. A segmented panel that incorporates squares of color abuts a more expansive surface area in which the colors change as the pattern further extends into our visual field. A third section, amorphously intruding into space from the lower left corner, appears amoebic, and shifts the composition’s otherwise tight gridlines into fluid zigzags. Encapsulated in a permeable membrane, the colors become more pronounced, as does a base layer that the viewer slowly realizes is repeated beneath. Forms mediated by other forms destabilize the picture plane and imitate a type of indolent fluctuation appropriate to the title.

In Tricky Track (2023), a serpentine form, similar to the curvilinear elements elsewhere, emerges from the pictorial plane. The modular units of the background are in contrast to the interrupted spiral that seems to reconstitute itself and, upon closer inspection, is riddled with breaks. Here, “tricky” perhaps connotes the illusion of one continuous line that is, in fact, interrupted; our eyes, quick to absorb information, betray our subconscious mind, which is slow on the uptake, pitting our senses against each other. It is not surprising that the allusion to trickery, combined with a verdant, twisting configuration, subtly recalls the Edenic tale of the earliest deception—the trickster tempting Adam and Eve off the right path/track.

The largest work in the exhibition, Phantasmagoric Rationale (2023), is a departure from other works, not only in orientation but in scale: The painting is 78 x 120 inches, and its balance between tertiary colors and the colony of white shapes is comparatively understated. In the expanse of the work, we gain insight into how Davis has perfected her formula for the strategic use of irregularity. The contour of white shapes on top and beneath a canopy of traversing lines glorifies imprecision and contrasts against the netted formation, a recognizable motif.

You

Are Here?

invites us to contemplate fugitive epistemologies in life and in art. To view these paintings as stable or factual is to risk misreading them. Grids contort on their axes in biomorphic sway. Arcuate shapes adhere to a mercurial logic we don’t quite grasp. Davis appears to give a nod to rhizomes in her intricate, ruled lines that power related networks; her works engage with the networks as proposed (but not necessarily inherent) bearers of meaning. Connoted by the asymmetrical lattice work that is a mainstay in Davis’s practice, nonlinearity morphs into something quasibiological. In fact, the ecosystem within the canvas emerges as a boundless organism, and Davis’s ecologies appear as part organic cross section, part unsortable algorithm. Luckily, these paintings teach us that (spatial) possibilities are, indeed, infinite.

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.

Position, 2022

Credible Counterfeit, 2023

Episodic Precision, 2023

70 x 55 inches

177.8 x 139.7 cm

Phantasmagoric Rationale, 2023

Oil on canvas

78 x 120 inches

198.1 x 304.8 cm

Lisa Corinne Davis

Born in 1958 in Baltimore, MD

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Education

1983

MFA, Hunter College, New York, NY

1980

BFA, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, NY

1978

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Solo Exhibitions

2023

“You Are Here?,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2020

“All Shook Up,” Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY

2018

“Turbulent Terrain,” Esther Massry Gallery, College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY

2017

“No THERE there...,” Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL

Galerie Gris, Hudson, NY

“Location...location...,” Farmer Family Gallery, Ohio State University, Lima, OH

2015

“New Paintings,” Gerald Peters Gallery, New York, NY

2014

Galerie Gris, Hudson, NY

2012

Peter Marcelle Gallery, Bridgehampton, NY

2011

“Abstract Infidelities,” Gavin Spanierman, ltd., New York, NY

2010

“Bona Fide Disorder,” Lesley Heller Workspace, New York, NY

2007

“Facts & Fiction,” June Kelly Gallery, New York, NY

2005

“person, place or thing?,” June Kelly Gallery, New York, NY

2002

”New Work,” June Kelly Gallery, New York, NY

2001

“Index,” Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY

2000

“Ontologies,” June Kelly Gallery, New York, NY

1998

“Chartings,” June Kelly Gallery, New York, NY

“Indirection,” Aljira: A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ

1997

“Essential Traits,” Longwood Gallery, Bronx Council on the Arts, Bronx, NY

1994

Dell Pryor Galleries, Detroit, MI

“Transparent Brown,” Halsey Gallery, School of the Arts, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC

“Layered,” Municipal Gallery, Atlanta, GA

1993

Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, VA

“Mixed Media,” Print Club, Philadelphia, PA

Group Exhibitions

2023

“Come A Little Closer,” DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY

“Given Time,” Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, NY

“Two Years and Change,” Olympia, New York, NY

2022

“DUAL: Lisa Corinne Davis & Shirley Kaneda,” New York Studio School, New York, NY

“Between States,” M. David & Co., New York, NY

“Summer Drift,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2021

“Exuberance: Dialogues in African American Abstract Painting,” Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA

“Un-Representation: Sanford Biggers, Lisa Corinne Davis, Jack Whitten,” The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY

“Point of Departure: Abstractions 1958–Present,” Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE

“I Dream in Black & White,” Olympia Gallery, New York, NY

“What’s It All About,” Jenkins Johnson Projects, New York, NY

“Multilayer Vision 20/20,” Schloss Plüschow, Uphal, Germany

“A Permanent Address in the Sky / The Burning Kite / Blow by / Shape of Wind,” Geary Contemporary, Millerton, NY

“Seeing Past the Future,” Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, Artland (digital exhibition)

“Hope For Bluer Skies,” The Mayor Gallery, London, United Kingdom

“Year of the Unicorn,” Store-For-Rent Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2020

“Art for Your Collection,” The Catherine Fosnot Art Gallery and Center, New London, CT

“A Place To Visit, vol.2,” jipgallery, New York, NY

“The Pursuit of Aesthetics: Artwork Created During Quarantine,” Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY

“African American Abstraction: Frank Bowling, Lisa Corinne Davis, Felrath Hines and Sam Middleton,” Spanierman Modern, Miami, FL

2019

“The Metaphysics of Abstraction III,” The University of Hawaii at Hilo Campus Center Gallery, Hilo, HI

“At The Core Club: New Members of The National Academy of Design,” The Core Club, New York, NY

“Dance With Me” (curated by Kyle Staver), Zurcher Gallery, New York, NY

2018

“Turbulence,” Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Gallery, New York, NY

“Known: Unknown” (with Suzanne Caporael, Nanette Carter, Lisa Corinne Davis, Louise Fishman, Suzan Frecon, Carrie Moyer, Jennifer Packer, Dorothea Rockburne, & Joan Snyder), New York Studio School, New York, NY

“Modes of Mapping,” Shirley Fiterman Art Center, New York, NY

“Lisa Corinne Davis, Sam Middleton, Norman Lewis, Herb Gentry,” Featherstone Art Center, Martha’s Vineyard, MA

“Benders” (with Brian Degraw, John Newman, Stacy Fisher, Matias Arganaraz, Pinkney Herbert, & Jon Decola), Real Estate Fine Art, New York, NY

“MacDowell Now: Recent Abstract Painting,” Curator Gallery, New York, NY

“Mixed Bag,” Real Estate Fine Art, New York, NY

“The Nature Lab,” LABspace, Hillsdale, NY

2017

“Lack of Location is My Location,” Koenig & Clinton, New York, NY

“Solace...,” New York, NY

“Text/ure,” The Shirley Fiterman Art Gallery, The Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York, NY

“Holding it Together,” 68 Jay Street, New York, NY

“Taconic North,” LABspace, Hillsdale, NY

“The Bedroom,” Joyce Goldstein Gallery, Chatham NY

2016

“Alternative Dimension: Lisa Corinne Davis, Maureen Hoon,” Project Art Space, 308 at 156 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

“Seeking Space: Making The Future” (curated by Julie Torres), David & Schweitzer Contemporary, New York, NY

“On the Waterfront” (pop-up exhibition), New York, NY

2015

“NEW NEW YORK: Abstract Painting in the 21st Century,” University of Hawaii at Manoa Art Gallery, Honolulu, HI

“Beyond Boundaries,” Flinn Gallery, Greenwich, CT

“Keep Out,” Lesley Heller Workspace, New York, NY

2014

“Soccer Mom,” Lehman College Art Department, Bronx, NY

“Awkward Phase,” New York, NY

“Nation II At the Alamo,” Sideshow, New York, NY

“Terra Incognita,” Storefront Bushwick, New York, NY

2013

“Terra Incognita,” Storefront Bushwick, New York, NY

“The Nature of Women: Anne Appleby, Marischa

Burckhardt, Lisa Corinne Davis, Sylvie Heider, Agnes

Martin, Aurelie Nemours,” The Mayor Gallery, London, United Kingdom

Lehman College Art Gallery, New York, NY

“Decisiveness,” RuSalon (hosted by helper), New York, NY

“Contemporary Cartographies,” Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY

2012

“Anywhere But Here,” Pelham Arts Center, Pelham, NY

“Two River,” One River Art Center, Englewood, NJ

2011

“Driven to Abstraction,” Von Lintel Gallery, New York, NY

“Time and Again,” McCormick Gallery, Chicago, IL

“Paper Jam,” Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY

2010

“When I Come Around: The Artists Around Me,” Apartment Show, New York, NY

Yaddo NYC Open Studios Crawl, New York, NY

“Group Show,” Craven Gallery, West Tisbury, MA

2009

“Eye/World” (curated by Emily Cheng and Michelle Loh), Triple Candie, New York, NY

“The Black and White Show” (curated by AMP Tracks), Collective Hardware, New York, NY

“Gallery Selections,” Spanierman Modern, New York, NY

“Lisa Corinne Davis, Edward Evans & Pinkney Herbert,” Allen Projects, New York, NY

“The Faculty Show,” Hunter College, Times Square Gallery, Hunter College, New York, NY

2007

“Art of Collecting,” Flint Institute of The Arts, Flint, MI

“Invitational Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture,” American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY

“Five Contemporary Voices,” Delta Arts Center, Winston-Salem, NC

“Universe of Art,” Credit Suisse First Boston, New York, NY

“Rhythm of Structure: The Mathematical Aesthetic,” Wilbur Jennings Gallery, New York, NY

“Glasgow School of Art/Hunter College Art Department, Works on Paper by Painting Faculty,” The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery, Hunter College, New York, NY

2003

“Works on Paper: Variations and Themes” (curated by Linda Gottesfeld), Pace University Gallery, Pleasantville, NY

“High and Inside” (curated by Maurice Tuchman), Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY

“On The Record,” Skylight Gallery, New York, NY

2001

“Paper Remix: Dieu Donné Workspace Program: 1995-2000” (curated by Edwin Ramoran), New York, NY

“Buying Time,” New York Foundation for the Arts, Sotheby’s Galleries, New York, NY

2000

“Book Art 12: Artist’s Books from the Library & Research Center,” National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.

1999

“Waxing Poetic: Encaustic Art in America,” The Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; traveled to the Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN

1998

“Black New York Artists of the 20th Century: Selections from the Schomburg Center Collection,” Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY

1997

“Generations: A.I.R. 25th Anniversary,” A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY

1996

“Artist in the Marketplace Benefit Exhibition,” Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY

“Prints,” Dell Pryor Galleries, Detroit, MI

“Allegory and Identity,” Visceglia Art Center, Caldwell College, Caldwell, NJ

“With All Deliberate Speed: Revisiting Race and Education,” Aljira: A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ

1995

Dieu Donné Papermill, New York, NY

1994

“Resisting Categories, Finding Common Ground,” City Without Walls, Newark, NJ

Gallery Annext, New York, NY

“Identity and Culture, African-American Heritage Exhibition,” Barrett House Galleries, Poughkeepsie, NY

1993

“Artist’s Books” (curated by Tom Butter), Butters Gallery, Portland, OR

“AIM Artists” (curated by Lydia Yee and Marisol Nieves), Bronx Museum of The Arts, Bronx NY

“Child’s Play” (curated by Holly Block), Art In General, New York, NY

“Nancy Bowen, Rosann Berry, and Lisa Corinne Davis” (curated by Rosann Berry), Organization of Independent Artists, New York, NY

“Emerging Artists” (curated by Corinne Jennings), Kenkeleba Gallery, New York, NY Granary Books, New York, NY

1992

“Utopia/Distopia” (curated by Kathleen Edwards), Print Club, Philadelphia, PA

Pyramid Atlantic Workshop, Washington, D.C. Okeanos Gallery, Berkeley, CA

1991

Artist’s Space, New York, NY

1990

Artist’s Space, New York, NY

AWARDS & RESIDENCIES

2023

Residency, Anderson Ranch, Snowmass Village, CO

2022

Fine Arts Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, New York, NY

2021

Arts and Letters Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY

2020

Grant Recipient, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York, NY

2019

Nominee, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, New York, NY

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Brown Foundation Fellowship, Dora Maar House, Ménerbes, France

2018

Painting Fellowship, New York Foundation for The Arts, New York, NY

Nominee, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, New York, NY

2017

National Academician, National Academy of Design, New York, NY

Presidential Travel Grant, Hunter College, New York, NY Fellowship, MacDowell, Peterborough, NH

2016

Summer Residency Award, Siena Arts Institute, Siena, Italy Residency, Corporation of Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY

2013

Nominee, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, New York, NY

2011

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Brown Foundation Fellowship, Dora Maar House, Ménerbes, France

2010

Residency, Corporation of Yaddo, Saratoga Spring, NY Residency, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York, NY

2006

Invitational Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY

2003

Residency, Corporation of Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY

2001

Biennial Competition Award Winners, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, New York, NY

Artist in the Marketplace, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY

2000

Artist Fellowship in Painting, New York Foundation for The Arts, New York, NY

Master Printer Residency, Printmaking Council of New Jersey, Branchburg, NJ

1999 – 1994

Board Member, Art In General, New York, NY

1997

Fellowship in Works on Paper, New York Foundation for The Arts, New York, NY

Workspace Program, Dieu Donné Papermill, Brooklyn, NY

1996

Project Room, Bronx Council on the Arts, Bronx, NY

Visual Artist Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C.

1996 – 1994

The College Council, Parsons School of Design, New York, NY

1994 – 1993

Advisory Committee for Exhibitions, Art In General, Brooklyn, NY

1993

Faculty Grant, Parsons School of Design, New York, NY

1992

Regional Fellowship, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Baltimore, MD

Select Collections

Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA

Atlanta College of Art, Atlanta, GA

Beinecke Collection, Yale University, New Haven, CT

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA

Mills College, Oakland, CA

Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ

Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, New York, NY

National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC

New York Public Library, New York, NY

Philadelphia Museum, Philadelphia, PA

Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY

School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL

Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE

Stanford University, Stanford, CA

University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

University of Chicago, Chicago, IL

University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO

University of Miami, Miami, FL

University of Rhode Island, South Kingston, RI

US Embassy, Lomé, Togo

US Embassy, Yaounde, Cameroon

Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

LISA CORINNE DAVIS YOU ARE HERE?

27 April – 3 June 2023

Miles McEnery Gallery

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

Publication © 2023 Miles McEnery Gallery

All rights reserved

Essay © 2023 Anita N. Bateman, Ph.D.

Director of Exhibitions

Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY

Publications and Archival Assistant

Julia Schlank, New York, NY

Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY

Dan Bradica, New York, NY

Color separations by Echelon, Los Angeles, CA

Catalogue layout by McCall Associates, New York, NY

ISBN: 978-0-9850184-4-3

Cover: Phantasmal Precept, (detail), 2023