Throughout his various bodies of work, Tim Davis photographs 'grand and gorgeous failures of light to sync up to its supposed functions.' In Permanent Collection, he focuses on paintings in museums, photographing them from oblique angles so that existing museum lighting glares off the paintings' surfaces, changing their often-reproduced meanings. By then enlarging the photographs to the size of the original painting, the light is allowed to do more than illuminate a painting's image, but instead can obscure, erase, add humor, sadness, strangeness or narrative to objects we think of as fixed and permanent. Davis's work has been widely exhibited and written about, and is included in numerous collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, and Fotomuseum Winterthur. Permanent Collection opens with essays by Bill Berkson and Walead Beshty.
Throughout his various bodies of work, Tim Davis photographs 'grand and gorgeous failures of light to sync up to its supposed functions.' In Permanent Collection, he focuses on paintings in museums, photographing them from oblique angles so that existing museum lighting glares off the paintings' surfaces, changing their often-reproduced meanings. By then enlarging the photographs to the size of the original painting, the light is allowed to do more than illuminate a painting's image, but instead can obscure, erase, add humor, sadness, strangeness or narrative to objects we think of as fixed and permanent. Davis's work has been widely exhibited and written about, and is included in numerous collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, and Fotomuseum Winterthur. Permanent Collection opens with essays by Bill Berkson and Walead Beshty.