Living With It: a solo exhibition by Liam Davis
On View at Goya Contemporary Gallery, Baltimore, MD
September 1 – October 16, 2025
Reception: September 10, from 6 – 8 pm
Baltimore, MD — Goya Contemporary Gallery is pleased to present Living With It, the gallery’s first solo exhibition by Liam Davis, featuring a new body of photographic-based conceptual works that explore perception and the poetic dissonance between personal space, aesthetic form, nature, memory, scale, and the arc of time—and how that arc seems to bend and evade succinct, definable comprehension.
In Living With It, Davis examines how objects—particularly those found in the landscape—act as intimate companions in the face of time’s vast and disorienting passage. Drawing visual and conceptual parallels between domestic space, time, and geological matter, the exhibition poses a central question: how do we make sense of things too large to grasp? And by extension, how can something as immense as a landscape, a nation, or even time itself be encountered meaningfully from within the four walls of a single room?
Referencing 19th- and 20th-century American landscape photography, Davis turns that tradition on its head. “Where early photographers compressed the sublime expanse of the American West onto 8x10-inch sheets of film—rendering the land legible, safe, and ownable—these new photographs reverse that gesture” says Davis. “In them, rocks from disparate locations—a stone found in Baltimore, a fragment of iron ore purchased online from the West—are placed atop scans of large-format film. Rather than reducing the vast to the knowable, these images expand the familiar, rendering the small into something monumental.” The photographs act as counter-landscapes—"portals that challenge assumptions of ownership, scale, and the idea that human perception is the proper measure of understanding the world.”
The exhibition is designed as one work, comprised of seven elements in addition to the added architectural details of the room itself. In it, “each stone becomes a metonym for the unseen: a fragment that carries the weight of unknown distances, histories, and extractions,” says curator Amy Raehse. “By shifting context and scale, Davis encourages viewers to reckon not only with what is pictured, but with what lies beyond the frame”—the landscapes and forces we live with, yet often fail to comprehend. In the space of the gallery, these elements tenderly bend toward one another in unexpected and quietly uncanny ways.
Living With It invites us to confront our relationship to space and matter, and ultimately, to our own limitations. “It asks us to dwell within complexity, rather than reduce it,” says Raehse—to live with it, and to open the doors of perception.
About the Artist
Liam Davis (American, b. 1999) is a Baltimore-based artist specializing in photography and interdisciplinary sculpture. His work delves into themes of perception and invention in material matter. Davis is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where he studied both Interdisciplinary Sculpture and Photography. He was part of the Living Records team that won the 2025 Biodesign Challenge Outstanding Art Prize. The Biodesign Challenge is an international competition that empowers creatives to envision and produce projects at the intersection of biotechnology, art, and design, often addressing societal and environmental issues. The annual BDC Summit gathers finalist teams to present their innovative work at prestigious venues including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Parsons School of Design in New York City.