Lisa Corinne Davis Exhibition on Display at Lesley Heller Workspace

Lisa Corinne Davis's paintings in oil on panel show her fluency in adapting abstract forms to the expression of meaning. Her forms have a rigorous ferocity that evokes wild-style graffiti, a kinship that is echoed in a color palette full of brights and contrasts, rendered with clean draftsmanship that sometimes echoes the "pop" of commercial illustration. Using a vocabulary of forms as individual as a fingerprint, she explores themes of hybridization, identity, and representation.

The proliferation and diversity of forms in her compositions stimulate the natural human desire to label and categorize. Some of her paintings teem with potent life, like a slide seen under a microscope, complete with microbes and dust mites, or larger forms like larvae, leaves, vines, seeds, stamens. Other works seem to draw

inspiration from the inanimate world of circuits and motherboards, or the world on a macroscopic scale: roads, maps, city blocks, geographic fault lines. Even as the eye seeks to break down these swarming forms into manageable groups, however, Davis's paintings reveal the futility of the brain's impulse to force objects -- or people -- into preformed categories. Drawing on her background as an African-American of mixed heritage, Davis builds a strong message about the inability of labels to encapsulate the meaning of the whole. These works encourage the viewer to accept the plurality of life, coaxing a pattern that may seem chaotic to emerge as peaceful and harmonious by virtue of its very contrasts and dynamics.

Davis lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States and Europe, and is included in such prestigious collections as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She has received reviews in The New York Times, Art in America and ArtNews, and is the recipient of numerous awards including The Louis Comfort Tiffany grant, a National Endowment for the Arts' Visual Artist Fellowship, and two New York Foundation for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowships. Davis's teaching career spans fourteen years. She has taught at Parsons School of Design, Cooper Union School of Art, and Yale University. She currently serves as Associate Professor at Hunter College in New York. 

Gallery Name: Lesley Heller Workspace

Address: 54 Orchard Street

Between: Grand and Hester

Subway: B, D to Grand Street / F, J, M, Z to Essex Street

Gallery Hours: Wed - Sat 11am - 6 pm, Sun 12pm - 6pm

Gallery Phone: 212-410-6120

Admission: Free

Exhibition: March 10 - April 18, 2010 - Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 10, 6pm - 8pm

Gallery 1: Lisa Corinne Davis, curated by Lesley Heller

Gallery 2: "Ocketopia", curated by Austin Thomas. Artists: Deborah Brown, Elisabeth Condon, Rico Gatson, Libby Hartle, Brece Honeycut, Jane Kent, Grace Knowlton, Molly Larkey, Jim Osman, Judith Page, Kevin Regan, Adam Simon, David Storey, Kay Thomas.

For more information on the artists and exhibitions please visit www.lesleyheller.com