Tim Davis

Tim Davis was born in Blantyre, Malawi (1969) and lives and works in Tivoli, New York. His work has been extensively exhibited in the United States and Europe. Davis' most recent body of work, The Upstate New York Olympics, is the artist's personal and often humorous investigation of the cultural impact of competitive sports. Exploring his local Hudson Valley landscape, Davis invents new sporting events, like the “Lawn Jockey Leap Frog and the “Trash Day Knife Toss,” and then performs them for the video camera, where as the only athlete he lacks competition. Davis acts like an athlete but doesn’t look like one, and these games often involve a healthy amount of trespassing instead of overblown pomp and circumstance. Shot in HD video with the thoroughness of his still photographs, the actual events are sincere attempts to interact with an underseen landscape and comic commentary on the seemingly arbitrariness of the actual Olympics.

The photographs in Davis’ body of work, The New Antiquity, were made over five years, in the suburbs of great and ancient capitals, in Italy and China, and then along the eastern seaboard of the United States. They portray a world where layers of time are collapsed. New buildings and structures and objects seem to be decaying into what Davis calls “a soon to be ancient past. Intended as a complex and open-ended work of “creative non-fiction,” the pictures in this body of work, made with a large-format camera, are both beautifully clear and vehemently obscure.

Tim Davis received a B.A. from Bard College (where he currently teaches), an M.F.A. from Yale University. Solo exhibitions include Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY; Jay Jopling / White Cube, London; the Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL. Several monographs of his work have been published including, The New Antiquity and Permanent Collection. He is the recipient of the 2007-2008 Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize and the 2005 Leopold Godowsky Jr. Color Photography Award. His work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim Museum, and The Walker Art Center, among many others.

For full bio please click below.

Download PDF (99 K)

Press