They Are What They Do
Text by di Shana Nys Dambrot. With a conversation between Woods Davy and Craig Krull. Foreword by Suzanne Muchnic
The sculptures by Woods Davy (born in Washington in 1949, lives and works in Venice, California) are widely recognized, exhibited, and collected throughout the world. For the past forty-five years, Woods Davy has been working primarily with natural form in unaltered states, predominately stone elements that he has collected from the earth and sea. Initially, he used them with linear steel structures, resolving a tension between intelligence and emotion. Now the stones are on their own, seemingly frozen in flux into both precarious and fluid combinations that appear weightless, defying gravity and their material identity. His current work conveys an emotional tranquility that jostles expectations with mesmerizing serenity.
Along the way, he has developed a passionate interest in the Kifwebe mask (from the Democratic Republic of the Congo) due to a shared sensibility. Like his Cantamar sculpture series, these masks are pathways to transformation, where the emotion they project transcends their form. They both are what they do, which is far more than what they look like.
This monograph is a comprehensive survey of Davy’s work from 1978 to 2023, with an introduction by Suzanne Muchnic, an essay by Shana Nys Dambrot, comments by the artist, and a conversation with Craig Krull.
Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Downtown LA. She is the Arts Editor for the LA Weekly, a contributor to Flaunt, Art & Cake, and Artillery, and the author of the surrealist novel Zen Psychosis. She writes prolifically for exhibition catalogues and monographic publications, speaks at galleries, schools, and cultural institutions nationally, and is the recipient of the 2022 Mozaik Future Art Writers Prize, the 2022 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, and the LA Press Club National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Critic of the Year award in 2022.
