Tim Davis

The work in Tim Davis's *Upstate Event Horizon* is not so much a group of images as a mass of spiritual offerings. For almost ten years, he has spent most of his time wandering around the towns, cities and rural roads of upstate New York, photographing a feeling of gravitational release from the black hole of New York City's influence. (An event horizon is the place at which light can escape the gravity of a black hole.) After thirty years of working with a large format view camera, carrying an immense load and only able to make a handful of images a day, he got a digital camera and was able to walk for hours and hours and hours, photographing all day long, like a seeker on a pilgrimage. The result is an immense and ongoing archive, not so much a body of work as a society of pictures — many thousands of images that convey this feeling of release into the underseen, sad and beautiful climate in this wild region. The work is shown as masses of images on a table. They are lovely prints, the same as finished works, but ones viewers can touch and handle, sift through and re-order, the way a stone may be placed on a pile of other stones at a shrine. Because the pictures have a formal consistency (vertical in format, condensed in organization, meaningfully aware of color), they feel flexible as a group, able to be placed in almost any order and make different kinds of sense.