Jamie Davis is the recipient of the 2008 Wendy L. Moore Emerging Artist Series award. Jamie completed her BFA in sculpture and metalsmithing at the Meyers School of Art in 2003, and graduated with her MFA in sculpture from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (in New Bedford, MA) this past spring. Jamie has exhibited nationally and internationally and is at a great place in her career to take on an exhibition of this scale. I expect she will create an outstanding exhibition – one that will mark the 10th anniversary of the Wendy L. Moore Emerging Artist Series, MOCA’s longest-running exhibition series.
While Jamie works essentially as a sculptor, her interest in time based installation processes adds a dynamic edge to her work. Her sculptural installations use a range of materials including wax, cotton batting, band-aids, salt cubes, and human hair to explore the role of the human body in the experience of memory. Jamie’s work also deals with how individuals perceive and reinterpret the past, present and future. As Jamie has explained, her work “addresses the inherent contrast between linear time and remembered time.”
A main source of inspiration in Jamie’s current body of work stems from personal circumstances experienced earlier in her life. Jamie suffered from an illness for about a year, and although she is in good health today, Jamie has consistently dealt with overarching themes related to the delicate nature of human mortality, the body’s capacity to heal, the essence of time itself, and what it means to let go and move on. Jamie’s ability to translate effectively these themes into a powerful and poetic visual language is one of the reasons the selection committee found her work so appealing. Additionally, Jamie has a natural eye for presentation, a wonderful sense of command over the materials she employs, and a general thoughtfulness that lends her work a provocative and original feel.
Jamie’s website, if you would like to take a look, is www.anotherjamiedavis.com. Her website has wonderful images of her work.
Her work is also on exhibit at Cleveland's MOCA www.mocacleveland.org/exhibition_details.php?ex_id=43
