January 31, 2008 – March 23, 2008
While still an “emerging” artist, Turner G. Davis’s work demonstrates the inventive capacity and range of accomplishment one expects from a mature career. As well, he is unusually prolific and elastic in his practice — experimental in terms of style, medium and technique, and with regard to the characters and scenes he renders so imaginatively.
Davis’s oeuvre is comprised by incandescent fairy tales rendered through the distorting lens of adulthood, possessed of clear-eyed innocence in tension with the equivocating forces of lived experience and darker imaginings. This sense of contrary energies in tension, and of surprise forged in that tension, is perhaps the signature characteristic of Davis’s work to date. Deeply engaged with figuration and provocatively narrative, Davis’s images present myriad realms of fantasy wherein meaning is implied rather than articulated directly. His images — whether Baroquely designed, lavishly layered and finished, or intentionally simplistic — suggest transmutation, sleights of hand and cloaked truths; a world of little jokes and mysteries, of childlike wonder tinged with Gothic nightmare.
A full-color illustrated catalog, Fantastic Worlds: Turner G. Davis with essay by Chief Curator Dr. Lisa Fischman, is available for $24.95 plus sales tax in the museum gift shop.
Turner G. Davis is represented by the Riva Yares Gallery
Read the Tucson Weekly feature, Incandescent Fairy Tales
