Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Installation, Design
Website: matthewedavis.com
Matthew Davis is a Canadian-Filipino artist and designer who moved from Toronto to New York after completing his Bachelor of Architectural Studies at the University of Waterloo. He went on to earn a Master of Architecture from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), where he received the Alpha Rho Chi Medal.
Davis worked as a practicing architect at OMA (Rotterdam and New York), Only If— (New York), NL Architects (Amsterdam), Coop Himmelb(l)au (Vienna), Arquitectonica (Paris), and KPF (New York) before founding his own practice, DAD D.P.C. He has taught as faculty at Columbia GSAPP and Parsons School of Design, and is currently on the faculty of the School of Architecture at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, splitting his time between studios in Brooklyn and San Francisco.
Alongside his architecture practice, Davis maintains a sculpture and installation practice and is a studio artist and board member at Root Division, a longstanding San Francisco arts nonprofit that provides studio space, exhibitions, and education for Bay Area artists. His art projects have been shown in Canada, Belgium, and the United States, including Project GUNK, a large-scale installation made with architect Reza Nik from materials scavenged across Toronto, which debuted at Nuit Blanche Toronto in 2019 and was later exhibited at Collision Gallery.
Davis’s art practice runs in parallel with his architecture work, drawing on the same interest in materials, assembly, and found form. As he has put it, his work “finds its foundation, or rather lack thereof, from the paradoxes between building materials, found objects, maquettes, and collages.” He treats objects as buildings and buildings as objects, using a collector’s eye to assemble scavenged and everyday materials — construction debris, discarded objects, maquettes — into sculptures and installations that build “object-meaning through peculiar visual and sometimes textual narratives.”
His projects range from scrappy, large-scale public installations built from urban detritus to smaller sculptural and publishing works, and often involve close collaboration with other architects and designers, reflecting a practice that moves fluidly between the studio, the street, and the design office.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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