Cameron Davis | Magnolia’s Desire
September 6-October 5 | Opening Reception: Friday, September 6, 5-7 PM
The Clifford B. West Gallery
Cameron Davis’s work explores ideas of radical aliveness and her evolving definitions of nature. She is interested in frameworks, conceptually and through the painting practice, that situate humans within the web of life. Plant patterns serve both as a reference to life, and as the basis for improvisational responses that in themselves reveal how life works; ecosystems of relationships that unfold through mutual transformations. (Andreas Weber) In the case of a painting, concepts, associations, surface, mark, color, and shape, generate felt structures, embodied rhythms, and emergent outcomes.
The paintings in the exhibition titled Magnolia’s Desire span a decade of consideration of a star magnolia memorial tree in the artist’s garden. The tree was first planted as a memorial to the artist’s mother because she noticed a neighbor’s tree in full bloom that late April when her mother passed. Her colleagues also gifted her a memorial lilac, not knowing that it would bloom a month later, on her mother’s birthday. Davis sees this month of heightened noticing of budding, blooming, and leafing out times as significant to her personal story as well as observational markers of climate change as the bloom times shift. Davis recently returned to the use of magnolia flowers and patterns in the current work, fascinated to learn that they evolved on Earth as far back as 95 million years ago, earning their symbolic meaning of enduring love.
The paintings are further informed by a decade-plus collaboration with composer Sam Guarnacia’s Emergent Universe Oratorio. Davis exhibited 12 large paintings as the stage set for performances in Shelburne, VT, Philadelphia, and Cleveland, and recently returned to the project rewriting the libretto with Guarnaccia, his wife Paula Guarnaccia, and Creative Leaps Founder John Cimino. Davis is currently working with animator William Tipper to create a video animation set design supported in part by a Vermont Arts Council Artist Development Grant for a forthcoming performance by Albany ProMusica. Immersed in the oratorio project’s content and visuals have directly and indirectly influenced the paintings exhibited in Magnolia’s Desire, from prompts to titles.
Biography
Cameron Davis is a painter and University of Vermont Senior Lecturer, Emerita, with the Department of Art & Art History where she taught Drawing, Painting, and Perspectives on Making. Davis was also a UVM Environmental Humanities Fellow and Environmental Program Affiliate where she taught & advised theses on Art & Ecology. Her paintings are part of public and private collections and exhibitions nationally and internationally.
