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PRESS RELEASE
October 15, 1981
DOUGLAS DAVIS
Uptown: Drawings
Downtown: THE WIZARD OF MALTA (three silver screens after Napoleon)
World Premiere, Saturday, October 24 at 5:30 PM
THE MOVING OBSCURA
Opens October 24
Uptown 33 East 74 Street, New York City Mon-Sat/10-5:30 212-249-4050
Downtown 31-33 Mercer Street, New York City Tues-Sat/10:30-6 212-966-3008/9
Douglas Davis opens a pair of closely related exhibitions at Ronald Feldman Gallery uptown and downtown on Saturday, October 24th. Downtown, Davis presents the world premiere of his new three-screen movie, THE WIZARD OF MALTA. Based (like his two earlier films Silver Screen and Post –Modern Times (in living technicolor). The artist and a star-studded cast leap from black-white screen to color screen. Davis himself appears as Humphrey Bogart/Sam Spade, as well as Charlie Chaplin, who now finds himself confronted by both the Wizard of Oz (played by Carlo Pittore) and the Witch of Technicolor (Laura Davis). At his side in both films is Rena Small, performing as Mary Astor in the Falcon, Judy Garland in Oz.
The action-packed chase that concludes THE WIZARD OF MALTA continues throughout the rest of the downtown gallery space. The characters romp through a life-sized, camera obscura room, three glistening black "sound boxes", and a boxed film strip that finds them racing straight into the street outside. The gold-sheathed MOVING OBSCURA room is a major installation containing a series of images that change almost everyday, moving time with the plot.
Uptown, Davis continues the playful subversion of media that has characterized all his work in the past few years. Here he shows a collection of drawings made between 1978 and 1981, all of which extend ideas and images that first surfaced in related performances, telecasts, radio broadcasts, and objects. They include Ghost Drawings, Radio Drawings, Movie Drawings, Sound-Track Drawings, and Obscura Drawings. Intimate and intricate, they incorporate elements as diverse as aged, previously annotated paper, collages segments from a long-forgotten "fan album" constructed by a forgotten movie fan decades ago, strips of film, snatches of magnetic sound-track tape, and most of all an enigmatic typed "line" which reveals itself – upon close inspection – to be filled with relevant content, and even, now and then, vivid lines from performance-film-and-video plots.
During the course of the exhibition, the gallery will co-sponsor (with the Center for Non-Broadcast Television at Automation House) a telecast on Manhattan Cable Television of the artist's remarkable live satellite video performance in May, Double Entendre, which linked two performers and audiences together between the Whitney Museum in New York and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Exact time and date available on request in November.
Douglas Davis has worked intensively in performance, film, video, print-making and drawing since the late 60's. THE MOVING OBSCURA is his first major installation. He has written and published often in art theory, architecture, photography, and contemporary cultural issues. He visits-teaches at universities around the world under the auspices of the International Network for the Arts. Davis has exhibited regularly at Ronald Feldman Gallery since 1977.
The cast of THE WIZARD OF MALTA includes Rena Small, Catlo Pittore, Laura Davis, Kenneth S. Friedman, Andy Canamella, Michael McDonough, Mary Elizabeth, Lisa O'Reilly, James Wines, and Diane Keaton. It was produced by Jane Bell and directed by Alex Roshuk. THE MOVING OBSCURA was designed
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