Moyra Davey

Description

Moyra Davey’s practice encompasses photography, film, and video, as well as reading and writing. She conceives of the latter two activities as inseparable and equally significant techniques of working: her alert, incisive readings of philosophy and literature prompt new writing, which in turn reflects back on already existing texts, building, as it does, on fragments, memories and quotations. By suggesting an affinity, or even a reciprocal mode of influence, between the acts of reading and writing, Davey locates the point at which the desire for non-differentiated production-consumption makes the two usually opposed sides of the process of communication meet and cross; that is to say, in Davey’s work, writing is reading. The monograph Speaker Receiver brings the diverse aspects of Davey’s work together. It features “Index Cards”, a new piece of writing by Davey, in which she reflects on subjects such as a recent illness, her personal mapping of Paris and her habit of reading newspapers. Rather than formulating a systematic argument, the essay unfolds in a series of short “takes” or fragments. Photographs distributed in order of their appearance within the texts interrupt the various writers’ contributions. Furthermore, for Davey’s own essay, and for the interview, the artist chose to reproduce her photographic “Mailers”, a unique series and format of work that Davey likes to refer to simply as “mail art”. -- Publisher Description.

Description

Initially known for her work in photography?which she has been making over the last three decades?New York?based artist Moyra Davey (born 1958) is also an esteemed writer, editor and, most recently, filmmaker, whose works layer personal narratives with explorations of other authors, filmmakers and artists. This book is based on two related projects that take form as text, photography and film. Les Goddesses (2011) collapses the lives of Davey and her five sisters with those of the daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft, the 18th-century feminist writer and activist. Hemlock Forest (2016) weaves references to Wollstonecraft, Chantal Akerman and Karl Ove Knausgaard with her own family stories. During the making of Hemlock Forest, Akerman took her own life. Her death soon engulfed Davey?s awareness, prompting a broader exploration of Akerman?s and her own biographies, amid more universal themes of compulsion, artistic production, life and its passing.00Exhibition: Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (28.10.2016 - 08.01.2017).

Subjects

Other Editions

• Moyra Davey: speaker receiverSternberg Press2010-01-01
• Moyra DaveyDancing Foxes Press2017
• Moyra DaveyDancing Foxes Press2014-01-01
• Moyra DaveySteidl Druckerei und Verlag, Gerhard2019-01-01
• Moyra DaveyNational Gallery of Canada2020-01-01