The Pretender

The Pretender is based on a found snapshot of a pink-haired girl seated in a lotus pose. Like many of Phil Davis's paintings, the image is drawn from a digital archive the artist has assembled over several decades. His source material ranges from mass media and popular culture—as in I'll Be Waving As You Drive Away, his recent exhibition at Fernberger, which drew exclusively from the 1970s television series Little House on the Prairie—to anonymous vernacular photographs, family snapshots, retrieved from other obscure corners of our image saturated culture. 

Davis is interested in the metonymic function of images: the ways in which a single image can stand in for broader cultural ideas or systems of meaning. In The Pretender, the lotus pose operates as a signifier of spirituality rather than a depiction of any particular subject. Through the act of painting, Davis suspends the image's immediate legibility, inviting closer attention to the cultural associations and psychological projections it carries.

Year: 2026

Material: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: W 36 x D 1 x H 36 in