Jym Davis
Design
BA Carson-Newman College
MFA University of North Carolina Greensboro
I have been instructing digital art and design as well as drawing and art foundations since I graduated with my Masters of Fine Art degree from the Univiersity of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2003. In addition to teaching at UNCGreensboro and Wake Forest University I have been very active in my exhibition record, participating in shows on the east and west coast as well as Germany, The Netherlands, Austria, Lithuania, and at The University of Thessaloniki School of Fine Arts in Greece (see press).
My work encompasses both traditional drawing as well as video and emerging digital tools while exploring such far reaching issues as science fiction, spirituality, and the human body.
My paintings and composite digital images represent a series of internal portraits inspired by documents of medical imagery, photographs and X-rays of the body’s hidden away places. I am interested in bringing an expressive eye to a detached scientific document, bringing together the artist with the observer and dissector. These work express my fascination with the living being behind the ghostly white of the X-ray; like a technician I sift through abstract bits of anima in search of the exact location of the soul. The images referenced in the creation of the paintings are of medical documents of my friends and myself.
The drawings have focused on more traditional, if somewhat surreal, ideas of self-portraiture. In a series of charcoal drawings entitled Water Bodies, seven-foot figures loom suspended and frozen in a dark void. I present the figures held in a moment of seeming molecular instability, as if in a transitional act of either being created or destroyed. I was interested in drawing fractured reflections of Renaissance models, inverting the classical ideal of the male nude. The figures are in fact created using a combination of video stills of myself under the distorting lens of the water’s surface. While I used modern technology as a way to study the effect of water and distortion, it was important to me that the warpage seen in the drawings was not digital alteration but in fact a purely natural phenomenon.
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