William A. Davison is a Canadian multi-disciplinary artist born in Nova Scotia in 1962 and based in Toronto since 1989. He has been producing art for over 40 years, working in visual art, film and video, performance art, music/sound, writing/poetry, networking, artistic collaboration, organizing/curating, and publishing. As a reaction to the cultural isolation and conservatism he experienced growing up in Nova Scotia, Davison sought out anything strange, nonconforming and subversive. His art and ideas developed under the influence of science fiction, the occult, underground and avant-garde comics, Dada and Surrealism, punk, post-punk, and industrial music culture. In 1984 he founded Recordism, his own idiosyncratic take on Surrealism. His prolific and eclectic artistic output derives from an uncompromising experimental approach and a commitment to the punk D.I.Y. ethos. Davison’s dedication to enlivening his local scene has gone together with an international reach via appearances at major festivals, exhibitions, and events, as well as through numerous publications and audio releases.
Festival and exhibition highlights include The Whitney Biennial (NYC, USA), Suoni Per Il Popolo (Montreal, Canada), Colour Out Of Space (Brighton, UK), Sound Symposium (St. John's, Canada), Deep Wireless Festival (Toronto, Canada), Radiophrenia Festival (Glasgow, Scotland), Spleencoffin Festival (Baltimore, USA), Art Basel (Basel, Switzerland), Leaderless - Underground Cassette Culture Now (NYC, USA), the8fest (Toronto, Canada), Archeology Of Hope (Isle Of Wight, UK), Violence of the Imagination (Brighton, UK), Splice This! Super-8 Film Festival (Toronto, Canada), Images Festival (Toronto, Canada), Anno 0 (Stockholm, Sweden), Las Llaves Del Deseo (Cartago, Costa Rica), TodaysArt (Den Hague, NL), and Printnoiz! Activisme Graphique (Marseilles, France). His visual art, comics, and writing have appeared in Rampike (Canada), Alkom X (France), Bilderberg Konferenz free zine (Germany), Maintenant 12 - A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art (USA), Surreal Estate anthology (Mercury Press, Canada), Carousel magazine (Canada), and The Walrus (Canada). His work has been written about in Musicworks magazine (Canada), Broken Pencil magazine (Canada), The Wire (UK), Arthur magazine (USA), Open Letter - Surrealism In Canada issue, Books In Canada, Exclaim magazine (Canada), Eye Weekly (Canada), Elle Canada magazine, The Globe and Mail (Canada), and in the books A Companion to Dada and Surrealism (Wiley-Blackwell, UK), The International Encyclopedia Of Surrealism (Bloomsbury, UK), The Guerilla Guide To Performance Art (Continuum, UK/USA), Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (U of T Press, Canada), Soundplay (Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Poland), Il Surrealismo (Skira, Italy), Caleidoscopio Surrealista (La Página Ediciones, Spain), La chasse à l'objet du désir exhibition catalogue (Liaison Surréaliste à Montréal, Canada), Hydrolith: Surrealist Research and Investigations (Oyster Moon Press, USA), A Phala 3 (Carnaval, Portugal), Art Action 1958 - 1998 (Editions Intervention, Canada), Side/Lines - A New Canadian Poetics (Insomniac Press, Canada), John Porter's Cinescenes (the8fest, Canada), and Constructive Anarchy - Building Infrastructures Of Resistance (Routledge, UK/USA). Davison's music and sound work has been distributed internationally on over 50 independent record labels.
W.A.Davison was a recipient of an Acker Award in 2018.
For information on W.A.Davison's music/sound activities please visit http://recordism.wix.com/noisician and for information on Recordism and links to other Recordist websites and social media see http://www.recordism.com