Artist Statement
Stemming from my own experience as an African American woman of mixed heritage, my work has been an exploration of the divisions and relationships between contemporary ethnic groups. Signs, representations, and abstractions reveal themselves in implied geography, cartoonish shapes, exoskeletal forms, spores, cancer cells, flora, fauna, and so on. Size, shape, and color function to shift and ultimately disrupt the viewer’s perceived ability to conclude that a form is fixed and nameable as perhaps an insect larvae, a piece of candy, an environmental contamination, or some other recognizable object. The impulse to identify and label the forms, and to force a system into the visual disorder in order to create a tidy, decisive, pictorial sense, becomes impossible as the viewer gives in to the realization that his or her decision making is a shifting, contingent interpretation of the visual information presented. Ultimately, these paintings reveal the extent to which our labels and fictions create an artificial simplicity, which guards a more complex and meaningful truth.
Website
http://lisacorinnedavis.com/