Moyra Davey

An essential selection of Moyra Davey's sly, surprising, and brilliant essays

Selected Essays

Index Cards

A collection of memoirs, diaries, essays, testimonials, and short stories by thirty women writers--including Margaret Atwood's "Giving Birth," "A Woman's Prerogative" by Mary Gaitskill, and Jane Lazarre's "The Mother Knot"--explores the joy, triumph, pain, and terror of motherhood. Original.

Essential Writings on Motherhood

Mother Reader

Aveek Sen

Les Goddesses/Hemlock Forest

Eileen Myles

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.--

The Shabbiness of Beauty

Helen Anne Molesworth

Photographer Moyra Davey takes quiet but ravishing photographs of typically overlooked and banal objects. Newspapers, dust, books, money, empty bottles, and the things on top of refrigerators all figure in series of pictures that bring viewers into a state of increased sensitivity to their everyday lives. Long Life Cool White features forty-five of the artist’s photographs from the past two decades. Davey’s relationship to such traditions as street and conceptual photography and French surrealism can be seen throughout these pages. Noted scholar Helen Molesworth examines the domestic content of Davey’s work as well as Davey’s burgeoning career as a writer. The book also includes Davey’s insightful essay “Notes on Photography and Accident,” in which she discusses the themes of chance, death, and the poetic that occur in the writings of three major theorists of photography: Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, and Susan Sontag.

Photographs & Essays

Long Life Cool White

The Problem of Reading

Gold Dumps and Ant Hills

Adam Szymczyk

Vivian Suter

R. H. Quaytman

More than thirty years ago the Swiss-Argentine artist Vivian Suter (*1949) moved to the rain forest in Panajachel, Guatemala, to live on a former coffee plantation. Since then she has worked on her impressive paintings in her wooden-hut studio, as well as outdoors. The tropical garden is her playground; her canvases lie on the sandy ground or hang in trees; dust, mud, leaves, mangos, and insects leave their traces on them. Her painting is influenced by organic processes and coincidence--even natural disasters are her material, when flood waters make their mark on canvases, becoming part of her large, colorful paintings. Containing documentation of her living and work spaces, as well as brief statements from companions and friends, the monograph also offers essays, numerous pictures, and insight into the artist's private life.

Moyra Davey

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