Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to present You Are Here?, Lisa Corinne Davis’ inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition is on view 27 April through 3 June 2023 at our 525 West 22nd Street gallery. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Anita N. Bateman, Ph.D. 

Over the course of three decades, New York based artist Lisa Corinne Davis’ paintings have transcended—or, more accurately, rejected—the labels of abstraction. While sparking initial connotations of grids and maps, the works deny the rigidity of categorization; instead viewers arrive before her compositions with their own perceptions and identities, drawn to discover their own conclusions. 

The exhibition title, You Are Here?, uses language to pave the way throughout the body of work. While the words alone imply a pinpointed orientation, the punctuation upends that assurance, presenting a question to be explored. Davis’ paintings, large in scale and rendered precisely in oil, further prime this notion of disorientation. Intersecting planes cover the canvases, populated by cartographic grids, warped lines, and amoebic waves. Titles like Tricky Track and Phony Position heighten the works’ destabilizing nature. 

To experience the paintings as Davis intends is to lean into the disorientation. Accepting that the works cannot be confined into stringent bounds, the viewer is prompted to rid themselves of automatic associations. Instead, one’s multifaceted lived experiences and intersectional identity provide a wavering guide to navigate with. 

As Anita N. Bateman, Ph.D. elaborates, “Davis understands that we are programmed to think in adjacencies, to find and filter through the connective tissues of our subjective experiences and observable nature. Her works are about bodies (the experiences of bodies, of subjects) as much as they are about contexts. It is no wonder that the paintings anatomize the degree to which we are controlled by the social and cultural contexts that structure our understanding, and stymied by the language that cannot account for things we have yet to experience.”