slow work - mistakes, lies, revisions and tenderness


Stacey Davidson explores the nature of personality through portraits.  She has experimented rigorously with sculpture, photography and stop-motion animation but painting remains the tap root of her work, and continues to be a vital practice.

Davidson is known for the dolls she sculpts, which have become a band of actors with ever-changing identities. The dolls are sometimes models for painting, and sometimes become sculpture.  They have always been vehicles for what a painted portrait could not carry alone:  cultural and personal content—the messy, heartbreaking, ridiculous, painful stuff.

Davidson’s exhibition is made possible through the Herbert & Louise Falk Visiting Artist Fund. The Falk program gives students at UNCG and members of the community an opportunity to meet and learn from prominent artists and scholars working in a wide range of disciplines. 

FACING-- portrait in community

In her teaching Stacey Davidson uses portrait work as a vehicle for bringing people together and as a demanding foundational exercise for students.  In this project a broad call for volunteer portrait models will go out to Greensboro neighborhoods.  Each drawing session will be scheduled for 60 minutes.  Students get the practice, models get the undivided attention of the artist, and can keep the portraits. While the project progresses, portraits will be hung in Greensboro Project Space, culminating in a closing reception on March 30th which will be both for this project and for her new work in the adjoining gallery.

We do not communicate face to face very much when we are constantly on our devices.  We are only beginning to understand the consequences of not making eye contact and not being bodily together.  As Stephen Marche of the NY Times wrote: The challenge of our moment is that the face has been at the root of justice and ethics for 2,000 years… The precondition … of any attempt to reconcile competing claims, is that [we] look each other in the face.”*  This portrait event creates a neutral setting for us to be together within the creative process of making a drawing.

*“The Epidemic of Facelessness,” Stephen Marche, NY Times, February 14, 2015

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