My Necropolis, 2009
Moyra Davey’s video My Necropolis pairs footage of cemeteries in Paris 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 [was] difficult to […]
Fifty Minutes, 2006
In Fifty Minutes, Moyra Davey’s first video, she uses the standard length of a therapy session to examine her own history with psychoanalysis while also raising questions about autobiography, nostalgia, and the ways we come to know and invent ourselves.
Blow, 2006 – 2008
From a series of three unique works collectively titled. Calender of flowers, gin bottles, steak bones, executed between 2006 and 2008. The title comes from the journals of John Cheever.
Bottle Grid, 1996 – 2000
Slyly referencing the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Moyra Davey photographed 54 empty whiskey bottles over a series of 5 years, each captured in the location where it sat after the last drop had been consumed. “One day about twelve years ago, a blurred picture of an empty Johnnie Walker bottle turned up at […]
Newsstands, 1994
In 1993-1994, Moyra Davey was photographing newsstands on the streets of New York. She writes: “I became interested in newsstands partly as an extension of a project I undertook while traveling, where I recorded actual newspapers on a daily basis, and partly from looking at and feeling inspired by Atgetʼs photographs of Paris. “As structures, […]
Dance Party, 1998-2000
Assembled over the course of many years, Dance Party brings together photographs of Davey’s husband’s LP collection (printed from super 8mm film), as well as various photographs of Davey’s adolescent friends in late 1970s Montreal.
Copperheads, 1989 – 1990
The Copperheads are a series of 100 photographs of pennies shot between 1989 and 1990. Moyra Davey writes: “When I began collecting pennies for the Copperhead series, I’d just moved to NY, had no money and was thinking a lot about the psychology of money: Freudian ideas that equate money with excrement; the Potlatch custom […]
Banknotes, 1989
A series of close-up photographs of banknotes (the $10 and $100 bills) shot in the late 1980s.
