MICHAEL DAVIS: PERCEPTION

Palos Verdes Art Center/Beverly G. Alpay Center for Arts Education is pleased to announce Michael Davis: Perception, on view May 5 through July 8, 2023. The art includes works presented to be viewed with 3D glasses, provided by PVAC.

“While navigating Landsat records of Earth’s land surfaces from space I discovered large areas of disturbed landscapes. These were immense open pit mines at numerous locations world wide, many of which were Rare Earth mines or REEs. The mining and processing to separate the rare earth elements is an environmental conundrum. On one hand these elements are in extremely high demand and necessary for electric vehicles and digital devices. On the other, these mining operations disrupt and destroy huge areas of open land, displace whole communities and exploit and deplete natural resources leaving behind toxic waste degradation. I began to incorporate these Landsat images into a new body of work titled “Rare Earth.”

Each Rare Earth artwork includes an archival image of a specific mine rendered in classic 3D  (anaglyph) off-registration referencing mid-century exuberant optimism, geo-political history, cultural signifiers, symbolic design patterns and phenomena. They are built from a collection of found materials, fabrics, wallpapers, digital imagery, paint, and precious metals. The digital Landsat image is positioned in juxtaposition to the other compositional elements to create a disruptive collage/painting of spacial contradictions, surface/depth and multiple cultural interpretations.”

Michael Davis

Michael Davis received his MFA from CSU Fullerton and maintains a studio in San Pedro, California. He has had over thirty-three solo and sixty-five group exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad for museums and galleries and city, state and federal arts agencies. Davis has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Hand Hollow Arts Fellowship, and an AIA Award of Excellence and has been a visiting artist and guest at numerous university forums.

Wearing face masks is strongly encouraged when visiting the Art Center.

“Our perception of a world of objects and events…cannot be explained adequately by simply referring (like a camera)…to processes within the eye or to the transmission of information into the brain about the retinal image. The usefulness of the analogy of the eye to a camera ends with the formation of that image; the problem of perception then begins.”

Perception by Irvin Rock, Scientific American Library, 1984