Teasdale, Paul, Moyra Davey, Frieze, #44, London ... - Greengrassi

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used the same technique successfully at the age of 22; Davey’s son Barney was born two hundred years later. Under the heading “Les Goddesses” we see only a photograph, no narration this time, of four figures dressed in glam-rock gear. May 22, 1976. The camera faces a mirror now: “How do you feel when you are with your son and your husband walks in?” I start to find I can piece together her apartment from the various shots and imagine her domestic life. Wollstonecraft died eleven days after the birth of her second child Mary (later Mary Shelley). High ceilings, airy, but the space feels claustrophobic; beyond are views over the water towers, rooftops, and rising steam. As children, the two daughters, Fanny and Mary, and the adopted Claire became known as Les Goddesses. The room is flooded with sunlight. Davey sits on the floor of her bedroom leafing through prints. The same four women from earlier, tight white t-shirts, slim. They stare, bare-chested and free of inhibition. The camera studies their figures intimately; they must have been close to the photographer. One illustrates an invitation card—”Moyra Davey: A Catholic Girlhood.” These are figures from her past, but they blur with the lives of Mary, Fanny, and Claire. Davey paces in and out of shot, always repeating her own recorded words. Galleries make Barney sleepy. His ideal day would be spent watching planes taking off. Percy Shelley died in a boating accident at Lake Geneva. At times a metallic Moyra Davey from the recorder can be heard over her recital as she begins to slip. She becomes increasingly frustrated as she looses the train of her narrative. Subtitles correct her. “Erratum: Percy Shelley died in the Gulf of Spezia off the coast of Pisa.” To what extent everything we are told is accurate is quite unclear. The narrative returns to itself, the making of the film, the motivation for specific shots. Whilst we hear the overlaid narrative, she takes books from shelves and blows the dust from their jackets: Mary Kelly, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton. Like Wollstonecraft, these are players in the inner space of Davey, a mental space we have been given an hour-long admittance. Small grimy spirals scatter out of the open window towards the air-conditioning unit of the building opposite. Images from Davey’s youth mingle with those of Wollstonecraft, her wider influences, anecdotes, historical incident, her domestic life, Davey herself. We watch her recite a recording on herself, by herself with a cold distance to this most intimate of subjects: her errors and anxiety show up as a false objectivity. We hear about Goethe’s close observations, about his ideas on the elasticity of air and space. Snow floats, hovers and falls hard. Outside of the main gallery space there is a selection of prints folded and posted individually to the gallery. Each depicts a different individual, writing in the green-orange light of the crowded subway. It is a return to figuration for Davey, but in her depictions of empty scenes and domestic settings the figure is never far away. The same underground writers are introduced in the film’s coda, one after the other, looking at the page lost in concentration, oblivious. Exploring the gap between the thought, the written, and the communicated, they are photographs of the subliminal. It is a space “Les Goddesses” manages to recreate for the viewer. With precise observation, this psychological self-portrait is a series of clues with no conclusion. Gareth Bell-Jones is a curator and writer based in London. He is currently Escalator Curator at WYSING ARTS CENTRE, Cambridge.
Teasdale, Paul, Moyra Davey, www.artweeters.com, London, December 2011. Back: Moyra Davey greengrassi Moyra Davey’s films deploy simple strategies to tackle complex subjects. With a far larger body of work as a photographer of quiet, seemingly inconsequential images taken of her daily surroundings, they add a further layer of documentation to her practice: the New York-based artist as writer and reader. Davey’s 2006 film 50 Minutes, for example, focuses on the years she spent in psychoanalysis, while My Necropolis (2009) analyzes an oblique line from Walter Benjamin’s correspondence. Part diary, part work-in-progress, the piling of citation and prose into short, refracted chapters results in reverberating visual essays. Switching between autobiography and historical inquiry, her third film, Les Goddesses (2011), is disquieting in its simplicity. Using little more than a video camera and voice recorder, Davey films herself walking around her apartment with one earphone in, as she listens to and simultaneously repeats pre-recorded passages. At just over 100 minutes long, it’s the most sustained of her films and perhaps the richest. The set-up is clear: Davey recounts the lives of the writer and political activist Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughters Fanny Imlay and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Mary Shelley), and their stepsister Claire Claremont (the piece is fastidiously researched: errata appear twice as subtitles to correct factual errors). These then segue into reminiscences about Davey’s own family. Images of the artist’s sisters punctuate the film, as Davey riffles through a series of black and white photographs she took of them and herself as young, defiant women in the late 1970s.
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Teasdale, Paul, Moyra Davey, Frieze, #44, London ... - Greengrassi

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