Encompassing a wide variety of techniques–photography, projection, sculpture, installation, collage, painting—Christine Davis resists formal categorization in her artistic process. Throughout her 35 year practice she has maintained an exploratory approach to art making that is, above all, “in the service magic.” Her work is well represented in public collections, notably in her native Canada, and she has exhibited widely and regularly since 1986. A seasoned visual artist with an intellectual’s perspective, over the years Davis’ inventive practice has grown in complexity and ambition. In a 2015 interview she gave to Asymptote, Davis describes her creative process as a “staging of collisions between contrasting ways of knowing and speaking…” In her work, she often redeploys the rhetorical devices of one system to interrogate another, “to explore experiences of the incommensurable” while enlisting “wonder as a radical force.” According to Davis, magic, in its purest sense as the active production of wonder, is both her subject and her method. Born in 1962 (Vancouver) into a family of peripatetic scientists, Christine Davis has been at home in six cities on three continents. She also roams with ease through the worlds of philosophy, literature, and history, as well as the broad fields of scientific investigation and material culture. Animated by “a cosmological impulse,” she proposes new forms of knowledge that are not created according to a system, but rather “emerge from a process of metamorphosis and transformation.” Davis characterizes her works as “machines for thinking;” they are conceived to eventually escape the apparatus of artistic control. After graduating from York University in Toronto (BFA 1984) she attended the newly formed Collège international de philosophie in Paris (1984-1987). Davis served on the board of directors of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (2002-2008) and, also in Toronto, on the board of YYZ Artists’ Outlet (1989-1993). She co-founded Border/Lines magazine (1984-1986) with fellow students of radical sociologist Ioan Davies (York University, Social and Politic Thought). With Janine Marchessault, in 1986 she went on to cofound the interdisciplinary journal Public: Art/Culture/Ideas. Her ongoing editorial work for Public intersects with the research driving her practice. In 2014, Davis joined CIBER (Centre for Integrative Bio-Engineering Research) at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver to explore nano-optics. Christine Davis lives and works in Toronto and New York.