Street Choir II

Sydney/Eora-based painter Michael Davis takes street trees as his subject, attending to the forms that line neighbourhoods, occupy public parks and mark the edges of the built environment. He isolates each specimen, observing its peculiar structure and character, and gives it a distinct place within a larger visual order.

In the immense panel works that form Street Choir II, his subjects appear in carefully arranged rows against dark grounds, rendered with a graphic precision that recalls the conventions of botanical illustration. Titles, often wry or oblique, lend these portraits a further measure of individuality. Viewed from a distance, the forms resemble lines of notation in a musical score, their variations gathering into a collective rhythm.

Davis’s woodworking practice extends into the construction and treatment of his frames, which are integral to the works themselves. The pale timber provides a counterpoint to the dark grounds, its surfaces scored and punctured with intricate arrangements of dots. These marks evoke constellations, or the small symbols used to denote trees when seen from above, extending the paintings’ attention to each specimen into another visual register.

Street Choir II is the artist’s second collection with Michael Reid Southern Highlands.