Swamp Sight, Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver, 2022

Swamp Sight
Wil Aballe Art Projects,Vancouver
Jan 8 - Feb 19, 2022

Exhibition Essay by Lauren Lavery

Working primarily between drawing and painting, Sarah Davidson creates compositions in which shadowy, biomorphic figures and delicate, foliated fragments mingle. Making reference to a history of discourses constructing the ‘natural’ world, their works investigate bodies, environment, observation, and the tangled strings which often bind them together. While they often draw directly from ‘nature’, their drawings diffract distinctions between embodied self and other through a queer ecological lens: critters and space collapse in upon one another, suggesting a permeable web. Both the eye and the mind work towards the known–animals, plants, brush marks, lines–but are caught in a space of undoing.

In Swamp Sight, Davidson weaves a world of uncanny connections around the act of looking. Frog, moth, and human eyeballs all appear to regard the viewer and each other. Drawn partly from observation, these works depart from natural history illustration to swim towards a strange new form of camouflage. A question floats among the forms: who’s seeing who, and how?

Sarah Davidson (they/she, b. 1989, Ottawa) lives and works in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. They have exhibited their work at Feuilleton (Los Angeles), Cassandra Cassandra (Toronto), Erin Stump Projects (Toronto), Unit 17 (Vancouver), The Power Plant (Toronto), Little Sister (Toronto), Birch Contemporary (Toronto), The New Gallery (Calgary), and Audain Gallery (Vancouver), among others. They were a finalist in the 2018 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, and are the recipient of awards and residencies including the Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation Grant (2021), The Banff Centre’s Late Winter BAiR (2020), and AiR Sandnes residency in Sandnes, Norway (2016). They hold a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art & Design (2015) and an MFA from the University of Guelph (2019).