Moyra Davey

Moyra Davey
Born 1958, Toronto, Canada
Known for Photography, Video, Writing

Moyra Davey (born 1958) is a Canadian visual artist. Over the past three decades, Davey has built an extraordinary and increasingly influential body of work composed of photographs, writings, and video. As opposed to a current predilection for large-scale, digitally manipulated photographs, her seemingly modest works reclaim a practice of photography grown out of contingency and accident. Her camera often turns towards the unseen or the overlooked, as her subjects include dust, books, records, coins, empty whiskey bottles, coffee cups, gravestones, and people writing on the subway. Her practice presents a wide-ranging model of engagement with the world: a reflection on possibilities of producing and consuming, on writing and reading, on novelty and obsolescence, and on the future of images amidst an economy of profuse reproduction. She currently lives and works in New York City and is a faculty member at the Bard College International Center of Photography Program.[1]

Moyra Davey was born in 1958 in Toronto, Canada.[2] Davey began taking photographs as a teenager in an improvised darkroom in a closet making, quote: “lots (of) solarized, hippie-looking stuff.” [3] She initially attended art school for drawing and painting but dropped out after a year, later enlisting in the design program and finally photography at Concordia University in Montreal. Moyra Davey received a BFA from Concordia University in 1982 and a MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1988. In 1989, she moved to New York and attended The Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.

Davey exhibited throughout the 1990s with Colin de Land’s gallery American Fine Arts Co., and from 2005-2008, she was a partner in the influential gallery Orchard. In 2008, Davey was the subject of a major survey at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, which coincided with the publication of Long Life Cool White, a monograph of her photographs and writings on photography. A survey of her work was on view the summer 2010 at the Kunsthalle Basel; this was her first solo exhibition in Europe, and marked the publication of an extensive catalogue on her work, with essays by George Baker, Bill Horrigan, Eric Rosenberg, and Chris Kraus.

Burn the Diaries, Davey’s solo exhibition of new work, was first exhibited at MUMOK, Vienna, and later on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia through December 2014. The exhibition was accompanied by a new publication. In April 2014, the Camden Arts Centre, London, mounted a large-scale survey exhibition of Davey’s work. In 2013, she had had solo exhibitions at the Tate Liverpool and Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver. Davey’s work was included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and in the 2012 São Paulo Biennial. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Art Institute of Chicago, the CCS Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago amongst others.

Important exemplars of Davey’s works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the National Galley of Art, Washington, DC; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.


Solo Exhibitions

Prizes and Awards

Art market

Moyra Davey is represented by Murray Guy gallery in Chelsea, New York [13] and Greengrassi [14] in London, England.

Public Collections

Publications

Videography

References

  1. ↑ Bard College International Center of Photography
  2. ↑ "Moyra Davey", The Whitney Museum of American Art, Retrieved 23 November 2014.
  3. ↑ Interview with Jess T. Dugan for Big Red and Shiny online art journal
  4. ↑ Exhibition : Ornament and Reproach, Murray Guy, New York, 2014
  5. ↑ Exhibition : Spleen. Indolence. Torpor. Ill-humor, Murray Guy, New York, 2012
  6. ↑ Exhibition : Les Goddesses, Greengrassi, London, 2011
  7. ↑ Exhibition : Speaker Receiver, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland, 2010
  8. ↑ Exhibition : My Necropolis, Goodwater, Toronto, 2010
  9. ↑ Exhibition : My Necropolis, Murray Guy, New York, 2009
  10. ↑ Exhibition : Long Life Cool White, The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2008
  11. ↑ Exhibition : Fifty Minutes, Goodwater, Toronto, 2007
  12. ↑ Exhibition : Monologues (with Julia Scher), Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, 2006
  13. ↑ Murray Guy Gallery website
  14. ↑ Greengrassi Gallery website
  15. ↑ The Problem of Reading available online at Murray Guy Gallery's website

External links

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