Dan Davis 2012
Here and There
June 14 – August 19
My work explores the journey of becoming a new parent. Over the past two and a half years, as my son slept, I found myself drawn to his objects that were strewn around the house, here and there. My gaze would light upon a diaper left on a window sill, or a pile of toys illuminated by late afternoon sun. As I started working on these photographs, I began feeling a sense of urgency to catalog my son's ever changing physical and emotional landscape through the objects he plays with, destroys or discards throughout the day.
My photographs are, of course, self-referential. But they are not just about me. They are about any of us who have been parents; and if we have not been parents we have been children. I hope that my photographs speak not only to the universal truths of being a child who loves to play, or to being a parent, but that they also speak to our culture of consumption and waste, to the feelings of fragility and safety one can pass through during an ordinary day, and to a parent’s constant desire to make order out of the inevitable chaos that descends when nurturing a small child.
