patachuteReview

Playful, irreverent, ironic, Sally Davies’ LuckyPaintings problematize the current tendency towards Neo-neo avant-garde, a trend emblematized by a seemingly never ending circuit of pretentious neo abstract expressionism and dull color field. New York may have gone gastrula, but Davies has chosen to quietly interrogate the values of the contemporary cultural scene. Davies’ paintings are also deceptively simple – small-scale acrylics (9"x12") that grew out of playing card-sized, custom-made tokens of luck.
       Davies also takes up technologized culture as ruin; her medium is out and out kitsch. A native of Winnipeg, Canada, OCA educated, resident of New York City, Davies is uniquely situated to profit on the attraction of tackiness. The Lucky Paintings are souvenirs: visually saturated souvenirs of intense feelings – love, hope, fear – once had and now lost. The first Lucky Painting was made to comfort a friend who had run out of money. The paintings are all designed to be as gratifying.   Each is the result of customization, each iconographically represents and discloses the dreams, the person objects, and the systems that bear meaning for, and nominate the identity of, the patron who commissioned the work. The reference then, is outside the frame, not in, ingeniously and melodramatically corporealized in kitsch’s traditionally syncretic terms.
       Lucky Painting No. 25b is intended – this is inscribed upon the canvas – "To Attract love" and contains a bottle of Chanel No.5, a high heeled shoe, a steaming apple pie, a heart pierced by the flaming dart of love, horseshoes and dice. Behind the banal appearance of things, however, lies a sympathetic magic: Davies’ images represent a personal idiom of the supernatural that is validated by the artist by means of a collaborative production process that is both nurturing and affirmative.
       Davies’ art does not invent things; it represents a return to fantasy, to caprice, to superstition via simulacra. It also represents a return to atavism and personal mythology. While the images are publicly symbolic and the inscriptions transcribe elements of a communal consciousness, each combination mediates a particular experience of time and space. Painting No.152 inscribed "to attract money and inspire original thoughts" bears the image of a woman painted according to Picassos cubist period as well as a tin of Campbell’s soup a` la Warhol; for the Canadian, Lucky Moose Painting No. 401, "for best results, always face painting north," features a moose against a snowy darkened sky. Since Davies is herself Canadian, the moose is semiotically and magically signatory.
       Davies’ art is devoted to "homework," the bodily and affective space of superstition, mysticism and familiarity. The practice suggests a certain vision of culture as a personal habitat whose material forms are the legacy of accumulated wisdom, bearing the trace of prior formulas and the impress of gestures shared by countless other individuals. Outside the habits of the body that give objects their shape and that create social spaces cluttered by personal accessories invested with meaning, then, there is the law of entropy. In the space that opens up beyond the art object, located metaphorically at Davie’s home, a dialogue is enacted between high and low, and the questioning of values in a system that both supports and interrogates hierarchical shifts.