self-portrait by the house wall by Anastasia Davis

Self-portrait by the house wall is an expressionistic portrait of a state of being that exists somewhere on the fringes of consciousness. In her debut book, Anastasia Davis depicts the sometimes-alien qualities of a claustrophobic internal existence and its blurred boundary with the outside world. A theater of muted domestic details are contrasted with anonymous exterior surroundings. A disembodied staircase or the undulating light pattern against a bedroom door are experienced with the same fragmented scrutiny as an outcrop of exposed rocks in the forest, the sharp pitch of a rooftop or the shifting texture of ocean waves. Within this dreamy body of ongoing work, Davis evokes a sensorial experience that taps into memory, displacement and the mysteries of our perception.

Anastasia Davis was born in 1987 in the Ukraine and grew up in Israel and the United States. She studied psychology at Northwestern University in Chicago and photography at The International Center of Photography in New York. She lives and works in Pittsburgh and is the winner of the Silver Eye Center for Photography 2018 Publication Prize.