JIAHAO PENG

A solo exhibition of photographs and spoken word prose by Tim Davis, an artist, songwriter, and essayist based in Tivoli, New York. The multimedia show opens with a reception for the artist and a music performance by special guests. This exhibition is an installation that echoes the mood and visual intensity of Davis’ new Aperture monograph, described as an expansive visual poem celebrating the glamorous surface of Los Angeles and its reach.

The exhibition presents twenty dye-sublimation prints, and three audio stations where visitors can listen to Davis reading his own essays — which are as dedicated to pleasure as his photographs — that accompany, accent, and accelerate the images he found by walking all over greater L.A.  In her profile of the artist, "Photography Is A Series Of Problems To Solve," Italian curator Rica Cerbarano writes: “Davis' photographs present different types of attractive surfaces—the ones that make us experience the world — of graphic signs, and of faces that are like masks. It is a journey, and like all the journeys, it has a soundtrack.” 

Tim Davis’ impromptu color photographs of people and street scenes in and around Los Angeles are unlike documentary photography or street photography. They are personal images revealing Southern California culture in a different way. In “Bar Fight As Artist Statement,” he explains, “A photograph is a key, and from it I’m trying to rebuild the ring, the lock, the building, the block and the city.” 

For the poster at the entrance of this show, he scrabbled the letters from Single Greatest Sign in History -- a photograph he made of a sign he found in downtown L.A. The poster reflects his depiction of rebuilding stories by drawing elements from what he sees and feels. It is a linguistic interlude, a hint, and a riddle tickling viewers before they walk into the show. From a panoramic view of the exhibition, the projected images, the installation of photographs, wall text and spoken word audio, are composed as a visual allegretto. It has the rhythm of the city - from sunsets to strip malls - to signage and performance.

Animating Tim Davis's wry observations and the mesmerizing, color-pop geometry of his images is the photographer and writer’s decades-long, gimlet-eyed meditation on making pictures. In his essay “Hey Look At This,” he observes: "The camera is a machine that sees only surfaces. The world casts its spell, and the camera gobbles up its glamour, uncritically, with pure certainty, assuming there is nothing underneath.”

Davis’ keenly observational images, interspersed with a selection of his writings on the medium — the joys and pitfalls of camera seeing—solidify I’m Looking Through You as an unabashed celebration of photography.

Tim Davis (Malawi, b.1969) is an artist, songwriter, and essayist who lives and works in Tivoli, New York. He received an MFA from Yale University and a BA from Bard College, where he is currently an Assoc. Professor of Photography. Davis’ photographs are in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim Museum, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in NYC; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Brooklyn Museum, among others.

His solo exhibition, When We Are Dancing (I Get Ideas), was at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, NY (2018); Transit Byzantium, shown at The Transformer Station, in Cleveland (2014); and My Life In Politics, at The Luckman Gallery, Cal State LA (2008). He also received solo exhibitions at White Cube, London; Greenberg Van Doren, NYC, Suzanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles, and the Samuel Dorsky Museum at SUNY (New Paltz), among others. His photographs were included in numerous group exhibitions, including Unsparing Quality, curated by Farrah Karapetian, at Diane Rosenstein Gallery (2014). He received the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize (2006-07) and a Leopold Godowsky Jr. Color Photography Award (2005). Monographs of his photography include The New Antiquity (Aperture, 2010) and My Life in Politics (Aperture, 2006). His new monograph, I'm Looking Through You, was published by Aperture in June, 2021.