Kate Davis
Could We? I´m Asking
October 13, 2005–November 12, 2005The Breeder, Athens
As well as questioning the role of Davis’ own visual forms, ‘Could we? I am asking’ challenges the function of the viewer and their relationship to the work; incorporating drawings, prints and objects to create a three-dimensional installation which is complemented and completed by the addition of the viewer. Exploiting an increasing interest in mark making, Davis concentrates on the figure’s relationship to progress, reworking structures, which facilitate change and embody potential.
“One prominent international strain in the art of the 1980s and early 90s involved a critical reinvestigation, informed by feminism, of a Surrealist legacy once perceived as fundamentally inimical to women. This movement coincided with a reshuffling of the deck of modernist art history that finally brought artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Meret Oppenheim and Eva Hesse the acclaim they deserved. It also, however, threw up an inordinate amount of second-rate contemporary art full of heavy-handed symbolism, clunky aesthetics, and simplistic politics. That was then and this is now. Davis’ explorations of the intertwined domains of the domestic and the carnal, the androgynous and the gendered, the theatrical and the esoteric, have a refined delicacy that is a world-if not several worlds – away from the cruder excesses of that earlier wave of feminist neo-Surrealism.” *
* Caoimhin MacGiollaLeith, ‘Participator’ Kate Davis, MAP, Spring 2005
