Christine Davis

M.M. Collage on "The Elements of Euclid" by Oliver Byrne. London: William Pickering (1847). 84 panels. Book I: Euclid/Ovid; Metamorphoses and The Four Ages. Book II: Euclid/Mallarme; L'Apres midi d'un faune. Book III: Euclid/Ovid; Erysichthon. Book IV: Euclid/Bataille; Language of Flowers. Book V: Euclid/Borges; Library of Babel. Book V/VI: Euclid/ Malabou; First Incision. Book VI: Euclid/Arendt; Being and Appearance.

The entire volume of Euclid's explanatory text is collaged over page by page while leaving the diagrams intact. The work proceeds by a slow process the artist considers one of "speculative infection." It is a private cosmology of the world as divided into two sets of things; one which is composed of the fundamental constituents of the universe - invisible to the eyes, known to science, real and yet valueless -and the other which is constituted of what the mind has to add to the basic building blocks of the world in order to make sense of them. "Knowledge of Life" draws from writing collected throughout her career and is perhaps best described as the act of tracing an idiosyncratic path to immanence.

Six channel video projection on six satellite dishes with metal stands. Each dish 10ft. 2in., 5 min.loop

Titled after Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle's 1964 film documenting the first manned undersea colony, "World without Sun,"explores the concept that the universe is made up of multiple subjective environments. The work evolves from the artist's interest in cosmologies, focusing in this instance on jellyfish and 19th biologist Jakob von Uexküll's concept of umwelt, or the perceptual world in which an organism exists and acts as a subject. Linking communication, perception and environment the work suggests an organic sublime which teeters on the brink of both oblivion and renewal. This liquid world begins and ends with the survivalist connectivity of luminescent jellyfish.
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"As if his throat opened into the void of stars," 2010. Sculptural projection, 9 x 16 ft wall, diamond dust, 16 ft brass pole, HD projector. 5min. loop

Along a path at once apocalyptic and serene, mystic and scientific, the work weaves a world where myth, daily news, distance and natural disaster are interconnected. Based on Ovid's story of Erysichthon in "Metamorphose, " greed and destruction cause the gods to curse man with insatiable hunger; after consuming all wealth and natural resources, he eventually devours himself. “As if his throat opened into the void of stars” layers footage of an erupting volcano billowing clouds of smoke and ash into the stratosphere with a dancer practicing in her basement through a symbiotic digital interface. The moving images are set within a sound collage mixing DIMI synthesizer, Funk, Hildegard von Bingen’s Harmonia and helicopter blades.
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"Did I Love a Dream?", 2008-2009. 35 mm colour film loop, copper cloth, 365cm wide x dimensions variable, 1min 12s loop

Joining a 35mm film projector with a 19th century sewing machine, a short film loop of a veil dance choreographed by Loie Fuller is projected on a suspended screen of translucent copper mesh. The image blazes with electric intensity. The dancer is surrounded with spiralling sheets of white silk manipulated by poles attached to the body. Creating forms that twist and fold in space the fabric appears to move the dancer in an uncanny spectacle that defies the laws of gravity. Image and screen meld in hybrid materiality; screen and space are inseparable as the copper cloth hits the floor and continues to roll out towards the spectator. The black and white film is intercut with flashes of dazzling red pure light - morse code.
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"Satellite Ballet (for Loïe Fuller)," 2009. 14 iTouch, black room

Through a dizzying array of images - hand-tinted Edison film stills, Fuller’s costume patent, Euclidean diagrams, high-energy particle collisions and accelerator tunnel – a short film of flickering stills is played on 14 iTouch screens. Nijinsky’s ballet "L’après-midi d’un faune" is used as a structural device for the choreographic placement of the tiny screens on the wall, each side of the cell-like room staging a scene from the Nijinsky's score. "Satellite Ballet" explores the complex history of dance notation through the artist's onging interest in human movement and transcription/translation processes.
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"Not I", 2007. Mixed media slide dissolve projection onto suspended screen of buttons, 2 mirrors, 4 projectors, 18min.

Words are projected in dissolve onto a screen dense with collected buttons of diverse shape, colour and era. Mirrors are suspended on either side of the ornate surface. The words above perform a segment of Beckett’s play, “Not I”. The passage below, from Simone Weil’s “Gravity and Grace”, is fragmented precisely like Beckett’s stuttering speech. The work moves through both French and English, with the translated text always projected in reverse. Different word pairings erupt within each language forcing points of intersection and disjuncture. The ornate words glittering in the dark are punctuated by the rhythm of the projectors.
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“DRINK ME or Alice was beginning to get very tired", 2006. Mixed media slide dissolve projection on screen of giant silk roses suspended with wire, 229 x 305 x 114 cm. 3min. loop

Through slow slide dissolves a woman methodically eats the pages of a book, Alice in Wonderland. Her performance is documented with slides, edited to 24 frames and projected onto a cube sculpted of giant suspended roses on stems. The material density of the screen both forms and deforms the image. Through this work the artist continues her exploration of the projection apparatus as a living assemblage where support and image meld in a process of thickening that slides between perception, hallucination and cognition.
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"Tlön, or How I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet’s entire history", 2003. Mixed media slide dissolve projection onto Morpho didius butterflies, honeycomb, aluminum, cork, velvet, and pins. 145 x 305 x 5 cm. 4min.loop

The work is based on a Borges story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius”, which recounts the invention of a virtual cosmos, Uqbar, and its idealized knowledge system called Tlön, attributed to "the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia." The space of the imagined planet is akin to the space of the screen in this work. A dissolve sequence of astronomy slides is projected onto a suspended screen of Morpho butterflies pinned into a grid. Two systems are overlaid: documentation of the heavens and the classification of wildlife. When combined, the two elements become a system of ordering and symmetry that is at once mystical and sadistic, absurd and universal.

"Pluck", 2000. Slide dissolve projection on suspended screen of feathers, 230 x 345 x 1 cm. 5min. loop

The work reflects the artist's ongoing interest in Mallarme, in this instance the mechanical act of chance as a trapeze act is re-choreographed by slide projectors. Executing a twirl mid-air, the trapeze artist’s routine is sliced into stills and projected as a dissolve sequence onto a suspended screen of black feathers. Rupturing the integrity of the projected image a surface emerges whose plastic hybridity is in constant metamorphosis.