Vaginal Davis

A performer, painter, curator, composer, writer, cultural antagonist, film scholar, and erotic provocateur, gender-queer art-music icon Vaginal Davis first gained notoriety in the late 1970s, primarily as front woman for various art-punk bands, including the Afro Sisters, inspired by Angela Davis, and as the publisher of two zines: Fertile LaToyah Jackson and its supplement, Shrimp. At the time, Davis worked out of HAG gallery, a DIY exhibition space she founded in her apartment on the Sunset Strip and ran from 1982 to 1989—a “botoxed” version of which was staged at Participant, Inc. in New York in 2012. Throughout the 1990s, she began a series of performances as art-historical critique, including Dot, a sort of tribute to Dorothy Parker; The Dona of Dance, a twisted celebration of modern dance; and Designy Living, which pays homage to both Noel Coward’s Design for Living and Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculine et Feminine.

Davis’ spirit of gnarly studio glamour also pervades the non-performance work, which has come to define her practice more and more over the last decade. This includes her Lesbiana Domesticity Wallpaper, hand silkscreens featuring a single brunette woman’s head repeated, hauntingly, over and over again; and her Various Hags series, cameo-like small-scale cosmetics-and-tempera paintings of women’s faces, often nose-less and with large eyes and pursed lips, painted on matchbooks, cardboard, envelopes and letterhead, and occasionally annotated with handwritten phrases such as “Corporations are not very attractive as people,” and “I am a woman trapped in the body of a woman inside a binder.” “My medium” says Davis, “is the indefinite nature of my own whimsy.”

Davis’ recent exhibitions include the Tate Modern, London, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Getty (as part of 2012 Pacific Standard Time), Los Angeles, The Wye, Berlin, Germany, Participant, Inc., New York, among many others.

Courtesy of Invisible Exports