A kind of stubbornness made me read Funeral Rites in its entirety. I both hate and love the book, and in a puerile fashion drew up ‘good’ and ‘bad’ columns to keep track of my thoughts.

I’d also been thinking about the author’s obsession with certain photographs of murderers and thieves, and snapshots of loved ones. In prison he fashioned a montage on the back of the rules board posted in his cell, affixing photos cut from magazines and newspapers, and drawing colored stars around his favorites. He could take this small placard under the blankets at night and live out his fantasies undetected. We learn of this montage in Our Lady of the Flowers…

At some point it crossed my mind to make my own version of the inverted rules board, and so I began with a giant photograph I call ‘Oozing Wall.’ This relic of an image from 1991 became the backdrop for a series of retrospective tableaux—compositions that might be thought of as talismanic, votives to persons past and present.

~~~~~~

“The task is to fill the empty page,” wrote Derek Jarman.

I am filling the empty page and I am also trying to make it count, trying to ‘risk’ something, as did Jarman. But my situation is different; I am not desperate, there is not the same urgency I felt after being diagnosed. I have immodestly spoken of my own “modest blindness,” and like Borges, I know the allure of confession.

Moyra Davey (b. 1958 Toronto) lives and works in New York. Throughout the 1990s, she exhibited with Colin de Land’s gallery American Fine Arts Co., and from 2005­ to 2008, she was a partner in the influential Orchard gallery. In 2008, Davey was the subject of a major survey show at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University and in 2010 a survey of her work was presented in at the Kunsthalle Basel. This Fall, Bergen Kunsthall will mount a solo presentation of her work. Recent solo exhibitions include MUMOK, Vienna, ICA, Philadelphia, and Camden Arts Centre, London. In 2013, Davey had solo exhibitions at Tate Liverpool and Presentation House, Vancouver. She participated in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and the XXX Bienal de São Paulo also in 2012. Her work has been included in a number of recent group exhibitions such as Photo Poetics: An Anthology, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Reconstructions, Recent Photographs and Video from the Met Collection and Photography on Photography, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Way of the Shovel at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Mixed Use Manhattan, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, New Photography 2011, Museum of Modern Art, New York, amongst others.

For more information or images, please contact the gallery at +1-212-463-7372 or info@murrayguy.com.