The
Ellora Gallery
Ben Howell
Davis
About
Ben Howell Davis
Davis
began his art career as a photographer and video artist more than 30 years ago.
From the mid-1970s to the late 1980s his works mixed photography, video, and
early computer and digital tools to create commentary about the mediated world.
In the late 1980s
Davis became a “digital refugee” and began to paint and draw. Less concerned
with commentary and more interested in the role of contemplation in a world
where it is hard to focus, a world where everything is “on” all the time, he
began to produce more abstract pieces in oils, oil pastels and graphite.
His
most recent works are concerned with simple phenomena and usually mark
particular periods of thought—the horizon, the garden, inertia, paths, growth,
transition. His deep concern for the environment is evident in the images he
creates; some pieces plunge the viewer face-first into nature with their
textured intimacy, while others invite a cooler, more intellectual reflection
on our place in the natural world.
Davis
explores many interesting questions in his work. For instance, the horizon line
in representational painting seems to be one of the last vestiges of narrative
before abstraction; without it, does space lose its physicality and become
purely conceptual? In the Eastern view of the progression of consciousness from
inertia through the passions to lucidity, what would inertia look like? The
garden is now a human-tended environment but once was the domain of the
gods—how do you show that? And what are the essential qualities of things—like
tables, ladders, walls—that work by being still?
Davis has worked and
taught at the Atlanta College of Art, the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, Razorfish, Inc. and, most
recently, at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. He has
published, lectured, and exhibited widely, and his work is in many museum,
archive, university and private collections around the world. He holds an M.F.A. from Florida State University (1975) and a B.S. in
communications from the University of Florida (1970). A summer resident of Nova
Scotia since 1981, Davis has recently become a permanent resident of Canada.
For more
detailed information about Ben Howell Davis, click here.