Sooner or later we realize that our perceptions are imperfect, our memories are as unfixed as sand shifting in an hourglass, and our sense of self is puzzled together piece by piece day by day from space to space. When I was first introduced to the work of Misha Davydov (they/them), I was struck by their poise with materiality. Not only were their images compelling, unsettling even, but their physicality and the way they were constructed stood out from other image-based practices I have seen most recently. Davydov’s work weaves domesticity, philosophy, and psychology into uncanny constructions that ask us to think about the very constructs we exist within: the constructs of medium, language, and identity, most specifically.

In Davydov’s practice, an object or image becomes a trigger for recollection–at once we are transported and thrusted into the ghost of the past, tracing its steps, its feelings; our stomachs turn, our eyes water, a lump grows in our throats; sometimes we laugh, other times it just hurts. Whiplash, both in the mind and in some unplaceable part of the body (maybe the heart, probably the lungs). However, Davydov’s practice plays with memory in a way that eludes sentimentality and rather peels away at the veneer of perception, revealing the curtain, the sandbags, the stilts that hold up our worlds. Their work goes past the fourth wall and begs us to look, not only at the works as they present themselves, but how they ask us to think (and at times, feel). We question how they came to be, yet the illusions never attempt to pass themselves off as more than what they are, a crack in the code, a glitch, an afterimage left by a flash on the retina–all reflecting back through Davydov’s own identity and artistic filter.

www.mishadavydov.com / @gelatinandsilver