DUST: VIDEOS BY MOYRA DAVEY – Conversations at the Edge Program Archive

Thursday, February 25, 6pm | Moyra Davey in person!

: Still from “Fifty Minutes” (Moyra Davey, 2006). Courtesy the artist.

New York-based photographer and writer Moyra Davey is known for her finely observed photographs of domestic interiors. Her graceful, straightforward images catalog life’s in-between moments and overlooked objects–still lifes of crowded bookshelves, empty whiskey bottles, and dust. In recent years, Davey has turned to video, combining her eye for the everyday with a literary voice. This evening, she will present two of these works. In Fifty Minutes (2006), Davey uses the standard length of a therapy session to examine her own history with psychoanalysis while also raising questions about autobiography, nostalgia, and the ways we all come to know and invent ourselves. In My Necropolis (2009), she explores notions of history, biography, and the memorial, by pairing images of Parisian gravesites (Gertrude Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, and others) with a lively, open-ended interpretation of an enigmatic letter written by Walter Benjamin from 1931. Davey, writes admirer John Waters, “will catch you off guard with her smudged, elegant, low-tech intelligence.” Moyra Davey, 2006-09, USA, Beta SP video and DVD, ca. 90 min (plus discussion).

MOYRA DAVEY (b. 1958, Toronto, Canada) is an artist and writer. In 2008, she was the subject of an expansive survey at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. Recent group exhibitions include Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium since 1960 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2008); and Calendar of flowers, gin bottles, steak bones (with James Welling and Claire Pentecost), Orchard, New York (2007). Davey is the author of Long Life Cool White (Harvard/Yale, 2008) and The Problem of Reading (Documents Books, 2003), and is the editor of Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood (Seven Stories Press, 2001). She was a founding member of the collaborative gallery Orchard in New York; with Jason Simon, she co-hosts the annual One Minute Film and Video Festival in Narrowsburg, NY. In 2008-9, Davey participated in the International Residencies Program at The Cité des Arts in Paris. She is a recipient of an Anonymous Was a Woman award, and is represented by Murray Guy in New York.