Davina Semo (b. 1981, Washington DC) has a BA in Visual Arts from Brown
University and an MFA from University of California, San Diego. Semo has
shown extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Her work has
recently been featured in numerous group exhibitions including at the San
Francisco Arts Commission, Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco),
and Parts & Labor (Beacon) where it was exhibited alongside paintings by
Deborah Remington. She presented solo exhibitions at three galleries in 2019:
Marlborough Contemporary (New York), Jessica Silverman Gallery (San
Francisco), and Ribordy Thetaz (Geneva), and in 2020, opened her first solo
institutional exhibition at the di Rosa Museum (Napa). In August 2020, Semo
premiered Reverberation, a Public Art Fund exhibition of large-scale bells at
Brooklyn Bridge Park. Semo lives and works in San Francisco.
The series of reflective bronze wall sculptures “Echoes,” feature punctured
surfaces polished to a warm metallic tone. Made in the tradition of Process
Art, these works embrace random occurrence, improvisation, and the
liberating qualities of foam, a nontraditional and inexpensive material, in their
production. Semo drills and scrapes into its supple surface creating
distinctive, irregular marks and compositions. She then crops the foam
compositions, as though drawing, creates a mold and casts the foam model in
bronze, a significant and everlasting material in the history of art. Through
these steps, the artist marries a material that allows her to be flexible and
spontaneous with one that will stand the test of time. Recalling domestic
mirrors in scale, these works offer the viewer an entry point to the artist’s
material and conceptual vernacular. Before it became possible to produce
glass with acceptably flat surfaces, bronze was a standard material for
mirrors, and today one’s warped reflection persists in the image of Semo's
powerful work.