A selection of paintings by Canadian born, Brooklyn-based artist Sarah Davidson. Davidson pursued their art education at Emily Carr University and the University of Guelph. Their interest in nature as a subject comes from ten years spent working as a wilderness guide for an outdoor school. Drawing from ‘nature’ through a queer ecological lens, Davidson weaves together observation and abstraction, evoking an ambiguous interiority. Many of the paintings appear caught in the process of transformation, porous and strange, wavering in and out of perception, or giving the overall impression of macro and micro worlds enmeshed:
“During the past four years, my gender identity has been in flux and my obsession with butterflies and moths (particularly the phase of their life cycles called ‘diapause’, when they transform) reflects coming to terms with my own trans non-binary identity, transitioning, and the destabilizing experience of having to rethink much of how I define and experience the world. I have a number of questions, as I develop my ongoing project: how does biomorphism relate to queerness, transness, and painting? How can elements of body horror in my work unsettle ways of looking at them? Is there such a thing as queer abstraction, or a queer art which eschews human representation?”
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