Pandemic Logistics

Measureable Phantasmagoria

Itemized Pandemonium

Analytical Anarchy

Quizzical Framework

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/

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Equation Study (Field), 18” x 26”; Oil, paintstick, wax, and alkyd on linen. 2008

Particle, 8” x 10”; Oil and alkyd on aluminum. 2009

Shoji I, 21 ¼” x 17 ½”; Oil, paintstick, wax, and alkyd on aluminum. 2009

Server, 21 ¼” x 17 ½”; Oil, paintstick, wax, and alkyd on aluminum. 2009

Systems War, 76” x 110”; Oil, paintstick, wax, and alkyd on canvas. 2009

Artists Statement
My work is a study of how the visual aspects of information can be conveyed — or distorted — within the framework of abstract painting. My source material is anything that transmits information visually, including diagrams, scientific images, written language, symbols, and musical notation. I use these forms to establish the underlying pattern of each painting. Then, as all communication is founded upon repetition and the breaking of the expectations that patterns engender, I stress the pattern through a process of editing, erasure, and re-transcription. The final image is a result of these accumulations and removals. Thus I conjoin the simplicity of a patterned field with the unique disruptions that can tell us something, though what it may be may remain elusive.

I use the traditional materials and supports of oil painting (pigment and stretched canvas) to stress, break down, and compromise the visual information I am working with. I start by defining a pattern or structure within the field of the painting and then build it up with layers of impasto and wax so that the pattern has a physical presence. I then scrape and sand the surface of the painting so that the source material remains only as a trace within the field. I repeat this process through many iterations, letting the various corrections, changes, and errors in registration accumulate across the surface of the painting. I initially use color to define figure-ground relationships, but it becomes another means of erasure as the work progresses. Because I work with patterns, time and repetition are important elements in my work; my paintings take a long time to complete, and the marks and erasures that accrue over time evidence the tension between the flat surface and the deep space implied by a field of color.

Website
My site
My blog

Upcoming Exhibit
Opening at Brooklyn’s Soapbox Gallery on May 28th

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O Teeth (66 x 34 1/8”, handmade oil on canvas 2009)

Selima Square (7 ¾ x 9 7/8”, handmade oil on canvas 2009)

Hege (32 x 27 ½”, handmade oil on canvas 2009)

The Melancholy Fishwives (65 ¼ x 37 7/8”, handmade oil on canvas 2008)

BINGO (9 5/8 x 12 ¾”, handmade oil on canvas 2009)

Artist Statement

Objects can be mental states, and mental states can be physical.

Paintings are physical objects. When I make a painting I try to follow this physicality as far as I can, starting with making my own paint from pigment and thinking very specifically about the stretcher and canvas.  By really following the physical nature of a painting, the mind/body distinction can undermine itself, generating a concept that is a physical object, a painting we can use.

It doesn’t matter exactly what the painting looks like – it matters, but it matters to the painting, not to me.

Websites

allmaier.wordpress.com
http://registry.whitecolumns.org/view_artist.php?artist=9682

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