Murray Guy is delighted to announce our first exhibition with Moyra Davey, which will also be her first solo exhibition in New York since 2003. This show will include a survey of works spanning nearly twenty years of Davey�s practice, as well a new series of photographs and a new film. Please join us for an opening reception on Saturday, November 7th, 6-8pm.
Over the past two decades, Davey has built an extraordinary body of work comprised 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. At stake is not just a series of discrete works, but rather an entire practice of engagement with the world, a reflection on possibilities of producing and consuming, and on the psychic lives of objects. Her practice of close looking reflects something like Virginia Woolf�s observation that the most satisfying kind of reading is that done with �pen & notebook� (or camera) in hand.
The earliest work included in this show will be Davey�s Copperheads, a series of one hundred close-up photographs of pennies. Executed in 1990 after the stock market collapse, these astounding images of Lincoln�s scratched and worn visage reflect on money, value and circulation. Also on view will be Davey�s series of Newsstand photographs (1994), and Bottle Grid (1996-2000), comprised of 54 images of empty whiskey bottles, each photographed in the location where it had attained �a state of depletion.� Various other photographs (1996-2007) show books, records, VHS tapes, and the rich interior of Davey�s apartment; in Helen Molesworth�s words, �a body of work in a minor key, a series of images of things simultaneously in the world and at the edge of it."
A new film, My Necropolis, pairs footage of cemeteries with attempts at interpreting an enigmatic line from a letter that Walter Benjamin wrote to his friend Gershom Scholem in 1931. Benjamin, living in very difficult financial circumstances, mentions a clock outside his window which increasingly becomes a luxury that �it is difficult to do without.� Alongside the film are a number of new photographs taken over the past year while Davey was on a residency at the Cit� des Arts in Paris. Mailed to friends in New York and unfolded on the gallery walls, these photographs trace the passage of time, showing graves and tombstones, clocks, coffee cups, maps, tabletops, and interiors. As Miwon Kwon writes: �Davey�s works remind us of �slow time,� the cyclical and durational experience of our daily existence that is the site of magic and drudgery, identity and history. . . not the truth of reality but what is true of a life lived attentively.�
Moyra Davey (b. 1958) lives and works in New York. She was recently the subject of an expansive survey at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard. Coinciding with this exhibition, Yale University Press published a monograph of her photographs and writing, Long Life Cool White, which is available from the gallery. She exhibited previously with Colin de Land�s gallery American Fine Arts in 2003, 1999, 1996, and 1994, and from 2005-2008, she was a partner in the collaborative gallery Orchard. Recent group exhibitions include Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium since 1960 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2008); and Calender of flowers, gin bottles, steak bones (with James Welling and Claire Pentecost), Orchard, New York (2007). Other books by Moyra Davey include The Problem of Reading (Documents Books, 2003), and Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood (Seven Stories Press, 2001.)
With many thanks to the D�l�gation g�n�rale du Qu�bec for their support of this exhibition, and to Brian Kish, Inc. for furniture www.briankish.com
From the current New Yorker (Dec. 21 & 28):
If you missed the photographer�s first retrospective, at Harvard�s Fogg Museum last year, here�s a remix: a beautifully installed selection of works, spanning two decades. The closely observed visual essays pledge allegiance to in-between moments�portraits of the obsolescent (record albums) and the overlooked (pennies). Fifty-four small black-and-white pictures, taken between 1996 and 2000, document empty whiskey bottles on daytime kitchen counters; installed in a grid, the piece is at once a matter-of-fact index and an ode to morning-after melancholy. Thirty-two unique color C-prints of everyday things�cluttered tabletops, clock faces, keys dangling in doors�made in Paris, then folded and mailed to friends in New York, wrap around three walls. Marred by postmarks and handwriting, with scraps of tape still attached, they�re battered monuments to memory, correspondence, and lost time.
Holland Cotter in The New York Times (Dec. 4):
Language, death and love are active elements in Moyra Davey�s photography exhibition, �My Necropolis,� at Murray Guy. Like many other shows now, it has a retrospective cast, with work dating back to 1990: close-up pictures of pennies worn and scratched, taken after the late-�80s stock market debacle; others of the artist�s obsolete record collection; still others of whiskey bottles left by departed drinkers.
The new work, done in France this year, includes similar still-lifes, but centers on a video the artist made in Paris cemeteries, a meandering tour in which the camera lingers over the tombs of celebrities � Stendhal, Fran�ois Truffaut, Gertrude Stein � in P�re Lachaise, but dwells on epitaphs and details of more modest monuments too.
On the soundtrack we hear voices discussing a passage from a letter by the philosopher Walter Benjamin. He wrote it in 1931, when he was broke, lonely and depressed, to tell a friend how he had become fixated on the sight of a public clock across the street from his apartment. He found himself looking at it constantly, as if it might have some answers about his life, though he didn�t feel reassured. The effect of Ms. Davey�s show is similarly ambivalent � is it about life or death? � though its meditative mood makes it an ideal exit point for a Chelsea tour.
Blake Gopnik in The Washington Post (Nov. 22):
Moyra Davey's photos can be so subtle they're almost opaque. When they hit home, however, they're compelling. One series in her current show consists of extreme close-ups on the almost obliterated face of Lincoln on used pennies. The pictures were made after the stock market collapse of 1987, but they resonate even more strongly now. A more recent photographic series simply captures 54 bottles of booze in Davey's home, at the moment each one's last drops were poured. It's a trivial instant in anyone's life, but there's something poignant in marking it each time it happens. Like most still lifes, these are as much about what is gone or fleeting as what is there.
*Please note that the gallery will be open until 3 pm on December 24, after which we will close for the holidays.
We will re-open on January 9 with
Vertically Integrated Manufacturing
Carl Andre, Fia Backstr�m, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Das Institut (Kerstin Br�tsch & Adele R�der), Dexter Sinister, Douglas Huebler, Allan McCollum, Stephen Prina, and more.
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17 August - 27 October 2013
David Renggli - in some respects a prodigy of the Swiss art scene - has repeatedly aroused the curiosity of the public for more than ten years thanks to a unique mixture of themes and forms, of spectacle, humour and poetry.
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