Location: Vallejo, CA
Medium: Film, sound, performance
Website: noiseforlight.com
John Davis is a Vallejo-based artist, sound artist, filmmaker, and organizer working at the intersection of moving image and sound. He manages Bimodal Press, a small Bay Area publication and label committed to experimental music, film, and related ephemera, and to ongoing collaborations with Bay Area media artists, musicians, and writers. His collaborative performance network is wide and long-standing, including artists such as Lawrence Jordan, Craig Baldwin, Paul Clipson, Kerry Laitala, Mary Helena Clark, Joshua Churchill, Maxwell August Croy, and Chris Duncan, among others. He has led workshops internationally — in Mongolia, Tajikistan, and Moldova — as well as at Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland, Indexical in Santa Cruz, and YBCA in San Francisco.
Davis's practice centers on the interplay of moving image and sound, extending across performance, single-channel film, studio recording, collaboration, workshops, and residencies. His performance work emphasizes improvisation and chance. His films incorporate archival, found, and original footage, weaving personal, nostalgic, cultural, and ecstatic themes into single-channel works. As a sound artist and musician he draws on field recording, magnetic tape experiments, and a range of stringed, percussion, keyboard, and electronic instruments. A reviewer in Hypnagogue.net observed that however far afield his sound work travels, it retains a faint melodic structure — "more a memory than something tangible" — that rewards close listening with unexpected intricate detail.
His workshop practice brings analogue filmmaking techniques — 16mm cyanotype processes, magnetic tape creative reuse — to participants in Bay Area venues and internationally. Through Bimodal Press and the Gravity Spells projects, he has helped sustain and document the Bay Area's experimental music and expanded cinema communities.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.