Moyra Davey
Visitor
Visitor is a major work by Moyra Davey that pairs black and white photographs with journal entries and autobiographical notes. Processing her son’s serious car accident and the family’s struggles dealing with the US healthcare system, Davey composed the images in relation to Hervé Guibert’s photographs, which portray friendship, intimacy, and sickness. Following Davey’s methods of incorporating the postal service into her work, the prints were originally mailed to the Palais de Tokyo in Paris for an exhibition. Significantly, this work represents the artist’s first foray into coupling script with photography. The writing is her “transcription” of intense conversations—around life and death, drugs and addiction—unfolding between her husband and her son during his painful recovery in the hospital. The juxtaposition of raw, textual material with the sheer visual beauty of the photographs creates a cognitive and even emotional dissonance that unfolds upon close reading. Visitor continues Davey’s trajectory of citing and digesting other artists’ works, while also turning an unflinching eye upon her own family dynamics. Processing an extreme life circumstance, the artist forges a new visual vocabulary of text and image within her own body of work—suggesting that transformation, both personal and creative, can also emerge out of trauma.
Moyra Davey’s work over the past decades across photography, video, and writing has exerted a quiet yet indelible influence upon contemporary artmaking. Bucking fashionable trends, she points to disparate literary and artistic sources in order to weave connections between her own life and wider intellectual trajectories. This mode of sustained citation allows Davey to incorporate other voices into an individual story. Her distinct practice of mailing photographs transforms the artworks from objects of display to something akin to gifts—photo-conceptual aerograms sent to a person or organization, with colored tape and postal markings as traces of a connection despite distance. Although her films since the 2000s take Davey’s own narration and staccato voice as a starting point, they move beyond autofiction into a more slippery, confounding, and compelling register. Through extreme detail, her works perform a kind of complex subjectivity, unmooring illusions of neutrality and critical remove. To quote poet and performer Kae Tempest: “James Joyce once told me: ‘In the particular is contained the universal.’”