Tim Davis

The Upstate New York Olympics

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Tim Davis. The Upstate New York Olympics. 2011. Video. Courtesy Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York. In association with FOTOGRAFIA International Festival of Rome and Zètema Progetto Cultura

Moscow, 30.03.2012—9.05.2012

exhibition is over

Central exhibition hall Manege

1, Manege Square (show map)
www.moscowmanege.ru

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The Upstate New York Olympics is Tim Davis’ attempt to make art while playing sports. Exploring his local Hudson Valley landscape, Davis invents new sporting events, like the ‘Lawn Jockey Leap Frog’, the ‘Trash Day Knife Toss’, or the ‘Compost Freestyle’ and then performs them for the video camera. Shot in HD video with the exactness of his still photographs, the actual events are sincere attempts to interact with and underseen landscape and comic commentary on the arbitrariness of the actual Olympics.

Details

Davis acts like an athlete but doesn’t look like one and these games often involve a healthy amount of trespassing instead of overblown pomp and circumstance. In ‘Other Peoples’ Balls’, Davis jumps fences into strangers’ backyards and uses their sporting equipment. The videos, made over four seasons (unlike the actual Olympics which seem not to care about Spring and Autumn) are shown on multiple screens, and are accompanied by a display case of editioned cast bronze trophies for specified events.

Sergey Kapkov and Olga Sviblova. © Alexander Pautov

Olga Sviblova and Sergey Kapkov. © Alexander Pautov

Vasili Tsereteli and Kira Sakarello. © Anton Galetskiy

For the press

About Tim Davis

Tim Davis was born in Blantyre, Malawi (1969) and lives and works in Tivoli, New York. His work has been extensively exhibited in the United States and Europe. Davis’ most recent body of work, The Upstate New York Olympics, is the artist’s personal and often humorous investigation of the cultural impact of competitive sports. The photographs in Davis’ body of work, The New Antiquity, were made over five years, in the suburbs of great and ancient capitals, in Italy and China, and then along the eastern seaboard of the United States. They portray a world where layers of time are collapsed. New buildings and structures and objects seem to be decaying into what Davis calls ‘a soon to be ancient past’. Intended as a complex and open-ended work of ‘creative non-fiction’, the pictures in this body of work, made with a large-format camera, are both beautifully clear and vehemently obscure.   

Tim Davis received a B.A. from Bard College (where he currently teaches), an M.F.A. from Yale University. Solo exhibitions include Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY; Jay Jopling / White Cube, London; the Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL. Several monographs of his work have been published including, The New Antiquity and Permanent Collection. He is the recipient of the 2007–2008 Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize and the 2005 Leopold Godowsky Jr. Color Photography Award. His work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim Museum, and The Walker Art Center, among many others.