MARK DAVIS • MOBILES
APR 1 - 13, 2022
Artist Reception: Fri, April 1, 4-7 pm

For most people, epiphanies strike when they are adults with an accumulation of life experiences. For Mark Davis, such a moment arrived when he was a 14-year-old living in Indiana and saw a picture of an Alexander Calder mobile. “I felt like it was a part of me,” he recalls. “I went to the hardware store for wire, roof flashing, and cutting shears and created a mobile like his with no knowledge of how to do it. I glued the pieces together because I didn’t know how to solder and made a beautiful copy of Calder’s Snow Flurry with white dots. “My parents loved it so much that they hung it over their bed. But each night, some of the glued dots dropped off and woke them up,” he adds laughing over the imagery from his naïve beginnings.

For the first 15 years of his career as a professional artist, Mark created high-fashion, sculptural jewelry for clients such as Vogue magazine and prestigious department stores in New York City like Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. In time, he reverted to his initial inspiration and passion: mobiles. “Usually, I envision something almost like a gesture,” he says of his process. “It’s not about one shape, but form and movement.” Over the years, Mark has added to his repertoire to include a range of sizes of hanging and standing mobiles; then wall-mounted mobiles; and, most recently, mobiles with C-shaped arms attached to bases and measuring 2 feet around and 2 feet high. His largest work features LED-rimmed shapes and measures 70 feet long, 30 feet wide, and 10 feet tall. The installation, Healing Waters, hangs above the driveway entrance to Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. Another substantial commission is an outdoor sculpture, 19 feet long and 14 feet high, for the Pritzker Family private estate.

Mark’s earliest commissions, which spanned 1988-1995, came from Tiffany & Co. to make mobiles for its window displays in New York and Boston. He sold a few of them, including one to the CEO of General Motors and another to actor Richard Chamberlain. Other notable collectors include Gary Trudeau, Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards, Howard Stern, Lexus, Liberty Mutual Insurance, and The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. Mark needs no external inspiration to continuing creating mobiles. “It feels like it’s what I am made for — to wake up every morning excited about the next step of a piece I am working on or trying a new idea,” he says. “It’s what I live for.”