Long Life Cool White: Photographs by Moyra Davey Opens at Fogg Art Museum
By Ryan • Feb 28th, 2008 • Category: News for Creatives (archives), Photography“CAMBRIDGE, MA.- The Harvard University Art Museums present Long Life Cool White: Photographs by Moyra Davey, on view from February 28 through June 30, 2008, at the Fogg Art Museum. This exhibition of 40 photographs marks the first survey of Davey’s work, and her first major exhibition in a museum. The photographs on view provide a comprehensive look into Davey’s 20-year career, which has included multiple solo and group exhibitions in galleries and group exhibitions in museums in the United States and Canada.
Moyra Davey’s work focuses on the humble and mundane accumulations of everyday objects such as stacks of newspapers, books, records, and money. Her images of domestic interiors feature dust, bookshelves, and the stuff that accumulates on top of refrigerators. Her New York City street pictures focus on the disappearing world of newspaper vendors. Shying away from contemporary practices of large-scale, digitally manipulated, and staged photography, Davey works on a small scale—typically in 20 x 24 inch format—and prints her own work. Her modest scale encourages viewers to focus their attention and consequently increase their awareness of everyday life.
Davey’s photographs and videos have been featured in exhibitions at Alexander and Bonin, New York; American Fine Arts, Co., New York; Artists Space, New York; the International Center of Photography, New York; LACE, Los Angeles; the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal; Massimo Audiello Gallery, New York, and the Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco; as well as other galleries and museums. She recently collaborated with Jason Simon on a video for 50,000 Beds, a project by Chris Doyle at Artspace in New Haven, CT, and is currently one of twelve founding members of Orchard, a co-operative exhibition and event space in New York City’s Lower East Side. She was also one of ten recipients of the 2004–05 award from the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation.
Helen Molesworth, Maisie K. and James R. Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art, curated the exhibition, and collaborated closely with the artist on this survey. “Working with Moyra Davey on this exhibition has been a lesson in subtlety; whether it’s how one looks at the overlooked or how one threads together passages from numerous books, Davey’s work invariably offers a kind of intellectual and aesthetic “time out.” She slows things down and hushes the room so that everyone can not only have their own thoughts but can hear them as well. ”
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