Moyra Davey

"Mood is all." A collection of essays and lists, fragments, random topics like The Fridge, Books, Analysis, Money, Times, [a:Vivian Gornick|75060|Vivian Gornick|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1260777260p2/75060.jpg], nostalgia, fear, pregnancy, hubris, illness, work and photography (her own as well as others). A section of the book takes place in Paris. Snippets pertaining to her four authors: [a:Susan Sontag|7907|Susan Sontag|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1285821018p2/7907.jpg], [a:Roland Barthes|13084|Roland Barthes|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1548241743p2/13084.jpg], [a:Walter Benjamin|1860|Walter Benjamin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1334719047p2/1860.jpg] and[a:Janet Malcolm|7446|Janet Malcolm|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1453969880p2/7446.jpg] And the crowning touch, her essay on The Problem of Reading.
"Reading is a favorite activity, a bulimic gobbling up of words as if they were fast food." So many identifications for me in this book. I keep dipping in and finding more to savor.… (more)

Sometimes you want your reading to feel like drinking a glass of clear cold water, and sometimes you want something more intense and complex (like a good fruit smoothie). This book is intense and complex, in a good way. A really enjoyable and thought provoking collection.
A collection of essays from 2003 to 2019 by a Canadian photographer, filmmaker and writer, including autofiction, journal extracts, day book entries and observations upon the need to produce work, as an artist. The collection includes essays that read as if they accompanied exhibitions of her photographs (Fifty Minutes, Les Goddesses and Hemlock Forest), but stand separate from the exhibitions, as discussions of the issues in creating the exhibitions, which can be very literary. The essays can be very critically self reflective and repetitive, but build something greater from these parts.

Near the end is an essay, The Problem of Reading, which discusses the dilemma of “what to read?”. I really enjoy essays about reading and this was no disappointment, and although not saying anything new, rounding up the usual suspects of Woolf, Calvino and Bloom, it was interesting in providing context for Davey’s approach to art.

Authors repeatedly quoted and invoked include:
• Freud
• Walter Benjamin
• Susan Sontag
• Roland Barthes
• Janet Malcolm
• Robert Walser
• Jean Genet
• Virginia Woolf
Although I only know of these authors’ names and may have read only a few paragraphs of their work, this lack of familiarity didn’t detract from the book for me.

There are some photographs, which sometimes appear to relate to the text, but these are small, so that they seemed to be there to symbolise photographs.… (more)

So, so good. Davey is writing at once about art, sex, womanhood, politics, memory and despair, weaving it all together seamlessly and without affectation. Her honesty is consistently piercing, often in a way that is both intellectual and emotional.

I really don't think it's an overstatement to say this book has changed me – it's definitely changed the way I approach art-making, compelling me to reconsider, among other things, the relation between the personal and the artwork. Her methods (note-taking, threading together different thinkers, etc.) have also made their mark on my own research and spewing of thoughts onto paper. Perhaps most importantly, this book has reminded me of the importance of risk and honesty, and has made me determined to pursue these ever elusive qualities.… (more)

’The Shabbiness of Beauty’ is a visual dialogue that crosses generational divides with the easy intimacy of a late-night phone call. Multidisciplinary artist Moyra Davey delved into Peter Hujar’s archives and emerged mainly with little-known, scarcely seen images. In response to these, Davey created her own images that draw out an idiosyncratic selection of shared subjects. Side by side, the powerfully composed images admire, tease, and enhance one another in the manner of fierce friends, forming a visual exploration of physicality and sexuality that crackles with wit, tenderness, and perspicacity. Spiritually anchored in New York City – even as they range out to rural corners of Quebec and Pennsylvania – these images crystallise tensions between city and country, human and animal. Nudes pose with unruly chickens; human bodies are abstracted toward topography; seascapes and urban landscapes share the same tremulous plasticity. These continuities are punctuated by stark differences of approach: Davey’s self-aware postmodernism against Hujar’s humanism and embrace of darkroom manipulation. The rich dialogue between these photographs is personal and angular, ultimately offering an illuminating reintroduction to each celebrated artist through communion with the other’s work.… (more)