Christine Davis

The Incandescent (or Second attempt at understanding)

February 10, 2024 – March 9, 2024

CHRISTINE DAVIS

The Incandescent (or Second attempt at understanding)

February 10 – March 9, 2024

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 10th from 2-5pm

“For All We Know” a special performance featuring Jarrett Earnest on February 17th, 2pm

“It burns, it consumes, it devours, it rebirths. The Universe as great conflagration: This inferno of transformation becomes the core of Christine Davis’ most recent work, The Incandescent, a poignant journey though the field of physical cosmology following the death of her mother. This ‘second attempt at understanding’ leads to a realm where pigments mimic prisms, black swallows all luminosity and butterfly wings write with light. Converging in sets of circles that defy a mechanical view of the heavens, Davis has created a provisory cosmos, an ensemble of points in space that shift with movement and remain open to categorical transformation.

The Incandescent intertwines concepts of cosmology, time and consciousness, echoing her earlier work, Tlön, or How I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet’s entire history (2003). Inspired by Borges’s tale of a fictional cosmos,“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius,” this exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts projected a dissolve sequence of astronomy slides onto Morpho butterfly specimens pinned into a grid. In this work, documentation of the heavens and classification of wildlife are overlaid in a system of ordering and symmetry at once mystic and sadistic, earthly and divine: Starlight, captured and projected, finds its final reflection in the animation of the iridescent scales of wings.

For the artist, the Morpho wing is an expressive entity, a scientific-poetic engram that creates line, colour, stroke, and cosmic memory imprint. Her work conjures a gravity-defying light writing, with the exhibition’s beating heart being an immense particle collision rendered in blue wings on a near absolute black canvas. Davis‘ practice consistently integrates the scientific and the magical, seeking understanding through dual intellectual and cellular absorption.

The Incandescent takes inspiration from philosopher Michel Serres’ concept that “Light, a movement, a displacement, a translation, a transformation… carries with it not only information but also movement itself.” On a microcosmic level, particles possess an inherent dynamism, constantly radiate energy and, according to the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics, fluctuate constantly in a state of potentiality. For Serres, on a macrocosmic level, the universe itself is an incandescent entity, akin to an immense cosmic flame radiating energy and continuously evolving. Bridging these scales, Davis’ cosmology emphasizes interdependence, recognizing that particles, organisms, ecosystems, planets, and galaxies contribute intricately connected to the larger cosmic expanse of existence. This version of the cosmos is not a static construct but a living and vibrant entity.

The material engine of the exhibition showcases Davis’ experiments with structural colour. Spectral analysis of the wing revealed a range impossible-to-replicate leading nonetheless to fabrication of custom interference pigments whose colours mimic facets of the colours of the wing. Layered on near-absolute black, these colours come alive as viewers move through the space, unfurling the cosmos as an ever-expanding flame, radiating both light and the very possibility of thought itself.” – Christine Davis and Thyrza Goodeve

About “For All We Know”

In “For All We Know,” a new work of short fiction first published in Ursula Magazine Issue 8, Jarrett Earnest conjures a new utopian religion in outer space, where the Carpenters’ discography holds immense celestial power. Join us at Olga Korper Gallery on Saturday February 17th at 2pm, for a performance of “For All We Know.” This event is co-presented by JSpot.

Jarrett Earnest is a New York based curator and critic. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018), Valid Until Sunset (2023) and editor of Hot,Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writing 1988-2017 by Peter Schjeldahl (2019). He has contributed to many publications and museum catalogs around the world. Jarrett has also curated several archivally based exhibitions: “The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York 1930-1955” (2018) and “WHAT A DUMP” (2021) which focuses on Ray Johnson and the role of collage and kink subculture in later twentieth century queer art —both at David Zwirner gallery New York. Most recently he curated “Ways of Seeing: Three Takes on the Jack Shear Drawing Collection” (2022) at the Drawing Centre in New York and “The Formless Body” (2022) at Olga Korper Gallery. In 2021, he was awarded a Dorothea and Leo Rabkin prize for visual arts journalism.