Christine Davis

Fotopsychodiagnostik

January 6, 2018 – February 3, 2018

The Olga Korper Gallery presents Fotopsychodiagnostik, a new series of work by artist Christine Davis. The exhibition will begin our 2018 program, opening on Saturday, January 6th from 2-5 PM and running until February 3^rd.

In 1921, Hermann Rorschach invented the inkblot cards that became the eponymous Rorschach test. He used a set of 10 symmetrical abstract inkblots to study psychological interpretation, imagination, thought patterns and the subconscious. Like staring up at clouds on a sunny day, the shapes of the inkblot cards suggested recognizable shapes, revealing insights into our state of mind. What do you see here? And here? Rorschach recorded his methods and the 10 diagnostic images in his book Psychodiagnostik a year before his death in 1922.

Nearly a century later in New York City, Davis looks out of her studio across the water at the Statue of Liberty. Torch in hand since 1886 (2 years after Rorschach himself was born), Lady Liberty has long represented the great American dream, an icon of enlightenment, of freedom, of peace and of safe harbour.

In Fotopsychodiagnostik, Davis explores a new geo-political landscape outside her window. Twisting Rorschach’s test, she photographs the view from her studio and mirrors the image on both its vertical and horizontal axis. From her window on the water in Red Hook, directly facing the Statue of Liberty, the landscape is a symbolic one; here manipulated, reflected, doubled, and warped into an image that projects something altogether unnatural.

Like Rorschach inkblots, Davis’ new diagnostic tests beg interpretation. We attempt to reconcile the image with what we know it should represent and make it whole again, but in the process something goes terribly wrong. Within the symmetry, we see instead mushroom clouds and post-apocalyptic cities. They are all at once seductive, and deeply threatening.

Davis is showcasing these images in lightboxes, recalling an antique x-ray machine, her doubled landscapes suggest that all is not right with the environmental sublime. Fotopsychodiagnostik is the artist’s direct response to witnessing the well-weathered symbolic view from her studio window, while listening constantly to the news. The work is a result of the disconnect between beauty and disbelief.

Her work sheds light on the fundamental epistemological questions of our time, where knowledge is continuously diffused, reproduced and diversified through an impenetrable web on information and communication. Moving between photography, sculpture, film and collage, Davis’ artistic practice resists categorization, maintaining a consistent methodology and exploratory material process. She discusses her distinct methodology in “Machines for Thinking.”

In keeping with this exploratory approach to art making, her Brooklyn studio encompasses ‘Free Assembly’, a workshop/think tank devoted to artistic collaboration and fabrication. Under this rubric, the artist would like to acknowledge the design and fabrication expertise of Tyler McKay, co-founder of “Free Assembly.”