I last thought of Tim Davis’ Permanent Collection project a couple of years ago, during Louise Lawler’s last show at Metro Pictures of Judd sculptures in the dark at MoMA. Lawler’s big dye sublimation prints had a reflective gloss that made them feel like a Davis photo. Meanwhile, like Lawler, but completely different, Davis made so much of the light falling on artworks, and the palpable experience of them.
Anyway, it’s only now, with this full-scale, Permanent Collection image of the National Gallery’s Vermeer, Girl in a Red Hat, glowing with raking light, that I see the project hits closer to Facsimile Object home. Definitely need to go back and look more closely.
1 Aug 2023, Lot 155: Tim Davis, Girl in a Red Hat (from Permanent Collection), 2003, est. $1,000-1,500 at LA Modern [lamodern]
2016 Tim Davis interview with Jordan Weitzman [magichourphoto]
whoops, looks like Prof. Davis’s domain name expired last year. [bard.edu]
Louise Lawler: Lights Off, After Hours, In The Dark, Sept.-Oct. 2021 [metropictures]