Kate Davis 

Reversibility (It is the body and Excised), 2011, Installation view GoMA Glasgow

Kate Davis has been commissioned to realise a new body of work for her solo exhibition at Drawing Room. Questioning how to bear witness to the complexities of the past, Davis’ artwork is an attempt to reconsider, reclaim and reinvent what certain histories could look, sound and feel like. This has often involved responding to the aesthetic and political ambiguities of historical art works and their reception. Working across a range of media, drawing remains the critical core of her visual vocabulary, and this exhibition will be the first time she addresses her relationship to drawing (as a medium, activity and history) so directly.

Focusing on ideologies perpetuated through certain approaches to the teaching of drawing, Not Just the Perfect Moments will attempt to stand alongside the late artist, Jo Spence, to re-examine and unpick some of the ways in which a representational practice, such as drawing, has constructed perceptions of the individual. Jo Spence’s groundbreaking photographic works often asked who owned images, and especially images of the body. In this exhibition, as with much of Davis’ practice, photography and drawing are brought into close relation, and both are questioned as techniques for challenging, and caring for, a past and future.

“ – it is precisely in its expression of this inferiority, that the drawing itself becomes valuable. It is because a photo cannot condemn itself that it is worthless. The glory of a great picture is in its shame; and the charm of it, in expressing the pleasure of a loving heart, that there is something better than a picture…”

John Ruskin


This exhibition has been kindly supported by The Elephant Trust and The Jo Spence Archive.

http://www.drawingroom.org.uk