Bill Davis: Exemplars opens at Iris Book Cafe,

August 28--December 12 

Manifest Rights is a corpus Davis has been growing for more than a decade. It began, in Prague, as a project to identify “the physical and sometimes psychological limitations that preexisting or emerging conditions place on the human body, mind and spirit,” Davis has explained. “[This] work addresses conditions that limit growth. It’s about survivorship. more than anything else.” As with all Davis’ work, the images are stark black and white, almost pitting the two values against each other. “I’ve always looked at black and white as black versus white.” And it’s corporal, as, in most instances, bodies push out of black fields, through the picture plane toward the viewer, or suspend within that plane, in a melding of design and sculpture.

The word “palimpsest” comes to us from Greek meaning to “again, rub” and refers to manuscripts whose initial information has been effaced and written over. Davis’ Palimpsests reproduce chalkboards filled with the marks and annotations of a mind progressing toward understanding. They play the exceptional ontological trompe l'oeil which has long eluded photography of seeming actually to be that which is photographed while continuing to be a representation that encodes artistic intent.As objects installed on a wall they are as solid as those they depict yet feel as transitory and erasable as the chalk marks they preserve, and those beneath already obscured. Although photographed with film, and thus effectively permanent, they have been digitally printed and refer to the deletable/replaceable nature of that medium as well. They are perfectly of their time. Beyond, or within this, each piece offers engagement with the thinking processes illuminated by the chalk, via numbers, equations, words, patterns, designs, resurrecting a forgotten and likely unappreciated aesthetic from academic days, apprehended from desks arranged as an audience for the performance art of formal education. They are beautiful and, in Iris’s setting, take on the added reference to menu boards from which to select nourishment and pleasure.

Davis’ Canopy series is his newest, intertwining a dismembered tree branches with cord in cats’ cradle-ish variants, binding their nature referent in suspended inannimation. The work is a response to Davis’ living for a time in a pre-Civil War era, wall-less house – effectively a canopy – and should activate a dialogue with Thin Air Studio’s drift wood and rope, canopy-like sculpture in Iris’ courtyard.

After acquiring a BFA from Ohio University in 1993, and before receiving a MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 2004., Davis moved to Prague to assist photographer Pavel Banka and teach, exhibit, and freelance in regional galleries the Czech Republic. In 1995, he exhibited in The Ljubljana PhotoFest and received a stipend to lecture at the University of Leeds, England. From Prague he helped launch Ohio University’s Study Abroad program, assisted in Venice, and translated Photo History coursework to lecture and teach for the Umeleckeprumyslove Academy of Usti Nad Labem. Upon returning to teach in the U.S., Davis received local, regional, and international grant support to work in Korea (Rotary Travel Selection), Vermont (Cone Editions Press/WMU Technology Grant), and exhibit in Australia (Federal Government Arts Funding Body of Australia), England (University of Leeds), and Ukraine (Ohio Arts Council/CKSCP) where he presented his work to the city’s mayors, the U.S. Ambassador and their respective cultural attaches. Since 2005 he has been Assistant Professor of digital and Photographic Arts at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

Davis’ images are held publicly and privately in international and domestic collections. Work from his exhibits have been reviewed and promoted in Art in America (U.S.), Light and Lens (U.S.), Young World Photographers (Slovenia), Art Against Terrorism (India),  Photographer’s Market (U.S.),  What (Ukraine), Portraits of Rite (Australia), and XConnect  (U.S.) and The Art of Photography (Exhibition Catalog, San Diego, U.S.). He has additionally published research in journals from Lamar Journal of Humanities (Texas) and IDMAA 08 (International Digital Media Arts Association). As his work reflects the nature of biography, identity, and digital culture, he has presented lectures on these topics from Karlovo to Harvard  Universities (at which he spoke about genocide's relationship to climatic deviation) and his experience at Photography, Humanities, Film/Video, and Digital/New Media conferences and workshops in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Among his numerous exhibitions in the Cincinnati area are those at Deogracias Lerma Gallery, Design Smith Gallery, the Dorothy W. and C. Lawson Reed Gallery in the University of Cincinnati’s DAAP College, and the 209 Gallery and the Carnegie Arts Center, both in Covington, and a piece included in “Cincinnati Collected” at the Contemporary Arts Center.

For more information contact Julie Fay at 513.260.8434