This week we welcome Sarah Davidson, a Brooklyn-based Canadian painter and draftsperson whose work often focuses on biomorphic figures. They pursued their art education at Emily Carr University of Art and Design (BFA in Visual Art) and the University of Guelph (MFA in Visual Art). Shortly after completing their studies, the artist worked as a hiking and climbing guide, spending months of each year in remote locations in Canada, the United States and Scandinavia. Davidson has exhibited their work throughout Canada and the United States, including solo exhibitions at Auxier Kline, New York (currently on view until April 25), Shin Gallery, New York (2024), NARS Foundation, Brooklyn (2023), Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver (2022), Feuilleton, Los Angeles (2021), and Erin Stump Projects, Toronto (2019). Their two-person booth at NADA (presented by Wil Aballe Art Projects alongside Daniel Giordano) was named one of the ‘Best Booths of NADA’ by ARTnews in 2023, and their work has been covered by Mousse Magazine, Canadian Art, Fukt Magazine, and more. Their upcoming projects include curating a group exhibition at Springs Projects, New York (opening June 2025), which considers queer and trans ecologies and includes artists from New York City, Montreal, Vancouver, and Rotterdam.
“While I often draw directly from ‘nature’, my work diffracts distinctions between embodied self and other through a queer ecological lens: critters and space collapse in upon one another, suggesting a permeable web. Meshes of hatching reveal glimpses into a jumble of images, and the works weave together observational drawing and an abstract vocabulary of shapes to evoke bodies and suggest an ambiguous interiority. Looking and other forms of sensing disintegrate into each other, revealing something porous, strange and seductive.
My recent paintings combine observational drawing with biomorphic abstraction, interlacing the kind of illustration most familiar from natural history guides with bodily shapes that hover on the edge of the appealing and the grotesque. Hovering between abstraction and figuration, many of the paintings seem caught in the process of transformation; goopy oil stick melts into thinly rendered linework, and flora and fauna waver in and out of perception. Cut with a jigsaw, the edges of the panels undulate slightly, like leaves or sheets of paper. In my large new diptych “Crypsis,” a central butterfly shape lurks behind spiky jimsonweed and a tangle of branch-like tubular structures. Shading on a leaf suggests both hair and muscle, and the overall impression is of macro and micro worlds enmeshed. The small new paintings, “Skipper” and “Brushfoot”, named for local butterflies, zoom in so far that their winglike patterns become an abstract texture.
I have a number of questions, as I develop my ongoing project: how does biomorphism relate to queerness, transness, and painting? How can elements of body horror in my work unsettle ways of looking at them? Is there such a thing as queer abstraction, or a queer art which eschews human representation?”
