[4][5][6] Her densely layered, colorful work merges contrasting schemas, visual elements and formal languages, blurring distinctions between figuration and abstraction, real and fictive spaces and concepts, and microcosmic or macrocosmic reference.

[25] Her map-like compositions simultaneously evoke and undermine systems of coding and categorizing race, identity and knowledge, privileging complexity, contingency and the primacy of direct, individual understanding and perception over collective, often essentialist frameworks.

[23] In solo shows at June Kelly (1998), Lehman College (2001) and Marlborough Gallery (2003), Davis produced obsessive, elaborately layered collage-style works that wedded modernist abstraction and postmodern content.

[28][29][30] They were created out of hundreds of variable elements taken from magazines, novels and history books: multiracial headshots, cutouts of eyes, multicultural alphabet signs, maps and fingerprints, reproduced in a palette approximating a range of skin tones.

[31][32][33][12] New York Times critic Ken Johnson wrote that this work "meditated with poetic indirection on race, culture, history and geography,"[28] while Holland Cotter described it as a blend of "pointed information and good-looking painting.

[1][6] Davis approached subject matter in a more subtle, open-ended manner balanced with formal concerns, expanding earlier examinations of racial, gender and identity codes into evocations of wider knowledge systems, often revealed as contingent and futile in terms of their ability to capture the plurality of life.

[1][6] Art in America 's Lilly Wei wrote, Davis's "riddled maps seem both familiar and not, suggesting aerial views of enigmatic terrain, details of a landscape in toxic erosion … an updated War of the Worlds [schema] or a blueprint of our ecological madness.

[3][35][36][37] Her proliferating forms—seemingly drawn from microscopic and macroscopic realms (cells, roads, maps, city grids, geographic fault lines), as well as the mechanical world of circuits and motherboards—charted concepts encompassing the urban experience of space and time, the fragmentation of contemporary life, and the diverse, intersecting strands of identity.

[5][3] Critics described them as "haphazardly rendered topographies or warped atlas pages"[3] delicately balanced between organic chaos and linear order, whose titles (e.g., Psychopathic Territory and Psychotropic Turf, both 2015) undermined their reliability as maps.

[7][2] Critics such as John Yau and Karen Wilkin suggested that their visual schemas and intentionally elusive titles (Registered Impersonation, 2020; Captious Computation, 2019) summoned a range of contradictory associations—natural to man-made, ephemeral and organic to technological—as well as allusions to corporate and governmental intrusion into private life.

Yau wrote, "the artist’s ability to call forth the invisible world, in which we are constantly leaving traces of our presence, injects an unexpected and much-needed jolt into abstraction"; Wilkin suggested the paintings evoked "the long views inherent in mapping and the intimacy of textiles.