Artist: Zack Davis
Exhibition title: Vivo Vitro Silico Situ
Venue: American Medium, New York, US
Date: January 10 – February 12, 2015
Photography: Courtesy of American Medium
American Medium is pleased to present Vivo Vitro Silico Situ, an exhibition of new sculptural work by Zack Davis.The exhibition is Davis’ first solo presentation in New York, as well as his first exhibition with the gallery. Using a wide range of materials and techniques, Davis considers the link between thought’s ability to trace and manipulate form and its own characteristics as a plastic medium rooted in structured matter.
A series of fever dreams: Your body is a dense field of clockwork machinery made of insect parts, and some set of chitin gears is binding again and again.You focus on the broken spot until it frees up and you can trace the motion out through the entire field, but each time you lose track it binds again.Your body is a battlefield of liquid armies. If you can focus the pressure perfectly you can force the sickness into a corner and destroy it, but it always squirts free, and you shift to confront it again and again with a feeling of restless legs. Bubble-like entities are growing inside you and to keep them in check you squeeze them down with your attention, but more keep appearing and you can only hold a few in place at a time.
Dreams are cascading perturbations in a brain closed off from external reality.We see this happening in certain kinds of simulated neural networks.When they are trained to recognize a human face, stimulation from the inside causes a cascade of new, plausible faces out to the sensory layer. For a fever dream, add the network noise of thermal disequilibrium and enzyme malfunction to get a twofold immunological drama: entropy in pantomime, an alien within, explored by thought that is itself generating new impressions of embodiment with increasingly frenetic goal-orientation.This is thought with the lid coming loose, burning through what Nick Land calls “the torture chamber of organic specificity”.
– Zack Davis, 2014
