About the Artist: Mariquita "Micki" Davis

Micki Davis is a Chamorro video artist based in Los Angeles who also produces digital books, performances, sculptures, and gallery installations. After being awarded a BFA from the University of Georgia in 2006 and an MFA from the Visual Arts Department at the University of California–San Diego in 2011, she has exhibited and collaborated on projects with artist collectives, museums, and publishers including Dashboard (Atlanta, ga); The Range (Saguache, co); Oceanside Museum of Art (Oceanside, ca); and There Goes the Neighborhood (San Diego, ca).

Photo by Joanne Kim

For the 2017 Honolulu Biennial, Davis's video Magellan Doesn't Live Here followed the construction of a replica sakman (ancient Chamorro sailing vessel) in California and its journey to Guam in time for the 2016 Festival of Pacific Arts. Offering insight into personal experiences of builders involved, including expressions of celebration and anxieties about returning home, this documentary also draws on the strength of their seafaring traditions and connections to the land and sea that define them. Her 2011 installation Close of Day drew audiences into a more performative engagement with ancestral practices and a social hour when families could reflect on past or present events and future possibilities. Conceived as a "visual fugue" with video projections, radios, a suspended tarpaulin roof, photographs, drinks, food, cards, and a table for audiences to gather around and chat, audience interactions in the gallery resonated with memories of social gatherings in Davis's grandparents' grocery store in Agat on Guam. Her 2014 digital publication Road Map of Guam for The St Claire (Philadelphia, pa), which combines video, text, and photographic imagery, represents a growing body of international artwork being created for dissemination and access online: http://the-st-claire.com/0215/post1.html

11.39pm 07/04/2017, by Micki Davis, 2017.

Instagram image from http://www.pictame.com/user/marimick/181593209

Attuned to chance events and to the subtleties of color and composition that she observes in her daily life, Davis displays a painterly quality in her photography and film that is informed by both poetic and political sensitivities. In this image, torn shade cloth frames a tantalizing glimpse of fenced-off beauty within a delicate tracery of shadows and mesh. Suggestions of movement and restriction between different realms evoke the diasporic experience of self-imposed exile and enforced separations, alienation from ancestral homelands, and longing for reconnection against the backdrops of political uncertainty and increasing global insecurity.

7:18pm 04/16/2017, by Micki Davis, 2017.

Instagram image from http://www.pictame.com/user/marimick/181593209

In the age of social media, where anyone with a cell phone or computer and Internet connection can create a global visual identity, artists and designers such as Micki Davis regularly share thoughts and images on platforms such as Instagram, offering snapshots of daily life and insights into current projects, working processes, and visual research. Sometimes these collections of images and text spawn other publications or provide motivation for gallery exhibitions. In other cases, the qualities of digital publication offer the most relevant option to an artist seeking to capture or enhance a sense of ephemerality, or an enigmatic, elusive, or momentary presence.

Close of Day, by Micki Davis, 2012.

Image from an e-book companion guide to a four-channel video installation and event: https://issuu.com/mickidavis/docs/closeofday_davis

Family photographs of the artist's grandmother, Isabel Santos Rivera, outside the family store in Agat on Guam were included in the gallery installation Close of Day and in the e-book designed to document and accompany the exhibition. Compositional and choreographic sensibilities of the photographer and performance artist are extended here to the realms of typographic and spatial design—fragments of thought, questions, and voices from the past are spaced on pages to enhance feelings of absence and presence, separation, connection, memory, and loss.

Performance...