What is my work about?
I create intimate collaborative experiences using photography as a tool to encourage interaction and exchange. I make interventions in photographic and physical space, working slowly over long periods of time and often in collaboration with neighbors and local organizations. Using a large format film camera in community-based settings, my projects are driven by a desire to empower those who are often silenced. In collaboration with Ivan Forde, I perform for the camera in site-specific digital video works. My practice is slow and deliberate, each project a gestural physical intervention in the public and private archive.
Artist Statement
My work is both photographic and collaborative. I use the camera as a tool to encourage interaction and exchange. In community-based projects throughout New York City, I work with a large format film camera to expand authorship, inviting neighbors into the creative process, and often making or exhibiting this work in public. In digital video performances my collaborator and I experiment using our bodies as tools to explore intimacy and conflict, responding to a natural setting that is removed from our urban home. My practice is slow and deliberate, each project a gestural physical intervention in the public and private archive.
“The People’s Poster Project” (2014) considers the future of the Lower East Side, a neighborhood dually threatened by redevelopment and increasingly dangerous storms. In collaboration with local community-based organizations and resident leaders in public housing, “People’s Posters” are large format photographic portraits of neighbors created during small group workshop sessions. Images are enlarged and printed on newsprint in editions of 2,000 and handed out for free. Resulting posters are then pasted outdoors on Pier 42 for a public exhibition over the course of several months. Exposed to the elements and made from a deliberately non-archival material, the posters deteriorate over time and new posters are added, standing in for a community’s resilience in the face of larger forces.
Created in collaboration with Ivan Forde, “The way and the light” (2013) is an improvised performance film shot in one take. It is the first in a series of site-specific video performances focusing on memory, intimacy, conflict, desire and trauma. Without prior planned choreography or any formal training in dance, our movements are inspired by the natural landscape and derived from experiments in non-verbal communication. Like “People’s Posters” this piece takes physicality as a central formal concern, expressed through gesture and interaction, rather than material presentation. In my analog works the tangibility of the image is significant, and the fiction of performance in opposition to a documentary reality is a strong thread throughout my photographic practice.
“Picturing Us…” (2012 – present) began as an experiment in collaborative portraiture and collective authorship. Imagined as a way to subvert the traditional power dynamic between photographer and subject, I facilitate interactive family portrait sessions, inviting South Bronx and Harlem community members to participate in my project. Using an extra-long cable release, families create (self-) portraits—participants are responsible for the crucial click of the shutter. Responding to the digital shift in image archives, the prevalence of cell-phone cameras, and today’s relative scarcity of physical photo albums, we work to create a precious archive of self-authored images with some of the last remaining 4×5 Fuji instant film (discontinued in late 2012).
CV
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2014
“Sonia Louise Davis: selections,” Rush Arts’ Corridor Gallery, 334 Grand Ave, Brooklyn NY
2012 “tracing(s) belonging(s),” an En Foco Touring Gallery Solo Exhibition Aguilar Library/NYPL, 174 East 110 Street, New York NY
SELECT GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2014
“If You Build It,” presented by No Longer Empty Broadway Housing Communities, 414 West 155th Street, New York NY
“If We Came From Nowhere Here, Why Can’t We Go Somewhere There?” Vivid Solutions Gallery, 1231 Good Hope Road SE, Washington DC
“Social in Practice: The Art of Collaboration,” co-curated by Deborah Willis and Hank Willis Thomas Nathan Cummings Foundation, 475 Tenth Ave, New York NY
2013
“NLE Curatorial Lab: Through the Parlor,” presented by No Longer Empty 24 Rutgers Street, New York NY
“The Photographic Self,” curated by Carla Williams Woman Made Gallery, 685 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago IL
“Bronx Calling: The Second AIM Biennial” The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Wave Hill, 1285 Avenue of the Americas Gallery
2012
“HOME,” a Community Exhibition curated by Christine Licata Casita Maria Center for Arts and Education, 928 Simpson Street, Bronx NY
“Global Positioning System (So You Say You Want a Revolution)” curated by Keren Moscovitch Westside Gallery, 141 West 21 Street, New York NY “The Learning Agency,” Wonder Women 7 Exhibition co-curated by Doris Cacoilo and Sonali Sridhar Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery, New Jersey City University, Jersey City NJ
“CPT: Time, History and Memory” co-curated by Keith Miller and Salome Asega Gallatin Galleries, 1 Washington Place, New York NY
2011
“GET IT ON THE RECORD” curated by Yulia Tikhonova Flatbush Library/BPL, 22 Linden Blvd, Brooklyn NY
2010
SVA Summer Residency Open Studios and Exhibition Westside Gallery, 141 West 21 Street, New York
NY AWARDS, RESIDENCIES & FELLOWSHIPS
2014
Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York NY
Emergency Grant Recipient
LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph, Charlottesville VA
LOOKbetween 2014 Participant Magnum Foundation, New York NY
Photography Expanded Lab: Collaborative Images Participant Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York NY
Process Space Resident, and Paths to Pier 42 Commissioned Artist
2013
The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx NY
Artist in the Marketplace Program (AIM)
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York NY
Manhattan Community Arts Fund Grant Recipient
2012
Casita Maria Center for Arts and Education, Bronx NY
Residency Unlimited Artist in Residence
Puffin Foundation Ltd, Teaneck NJ
2012 Grant Cycle Recipient
_gaia studio, Jersey City NJ
Wonder Women Residency
2011
The Laundromat Project, New York NY
Create Change Professional Development Fellowship, Merit Scholarship
2010
School of Visual Arts, New York NY
Summer Residency: Photography
Wesleyan University, Middletown CT
African American Studies Department Vanguard Prize
2009
Wesleyan University, Middletown CT
Wesleyan Black Alumni Council Memorial Prize
ARTIST TALKS
Social in Practice Panel Discussion Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York NY, September 2014
Sonia Louise Davis, Qiana Mestrich and Renee Cox
Rush Arts’ Corridor Gallery, Brooklyn NY, April 2014
NLE Lab Artist Talk, with Heather Hart and Betty Yu
24 Rutgers Street, New York NY, December 2013
SPOOK Magazine Issue 3 Panel
Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Brooklyn NY, November 2013
The Finding Aid: Black Women at the Intersection of Art and Archiving Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York NY, May 2013
Career Panel, Urban Arts Partnership 21 Howard Street, New York NY, February 2013
Residency Unlimited Artist Talk, with Kalia Brooks, Shlomit Dror and Kameelah Rasheed 360 Court Street, Brooklyn NY, December 2012
En Foco Touring Gallery Artist Talk Aguilar Library/NYPL, 174 East 110 Street, New York NY, May 2012
A Cut Above, Visiting Artist Talk at Harlem Children’s Zone National Black Theater, 2031 Fifth Ave, New York NY, March 2012
A-Lab Forum: DOCUART Participating Artist Crossing Art Gallery, 136-17 39th Ave, Queens NY, March 2012
Be The Art, Alumni Artist Talk Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown CT, February 2012
EDUCATION
Wesleyan University, Middletown CT
Bachelor of Arts with Honors in African American Studies, concentration in Music and Visual Arts, 2010
Honors Thesis, “Rhyme and Dissonance: Shared Strategies in works by Lorna Simpson, Wangechi Mutu and Leslie Hewitt,” published April 15, 2010. over 2500 full-text downloads as of 8/26/2014 http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/etd_hon_theses/591