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

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Moira Davey Les Goddesses, 2011, DVD still Wollstonecraft’s daughters were nicknamed ‘les goddesses’ by a family friend, and were linked in love and tragedy by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Davey tells us that Shelley initially had eyes for Fanny, before turning his attentions to Mary (and then, allegedly, to Claire). Fanny, devastated when her sisters eloped to mainland Europe with Shelley, followed her mother – who was similarly heartbroken, having been rejected by Fanny’s father Gilbert – in attempting suicide by drinking laudanum. Unlike her mother, however, Fanny succeeded and died at the age of 22. Neutralizing the frequently salacious accounts of these episodes, Davey’s delivery is dense and monotonous. Her analysis spills over into the personal, as affinities with her own life suggest themselves: she mentions her son, her father’s early death, her sister Jane’s similarity to Mary Shelley, among other things. Clearly Davey is more comfortable with research than with the confessional mode. ‘Why does everyone want to tell a story?’, she asks, ‘Why do all my students talk about “representing memory”?’. Later Davey mentions that a selection of texts she has accumulated lie buried in a folder labelled ‘Pathography’. Just as with the method used in her short essay ‘The Problem of Reading’ (2003), a beautifully weighted analysis of the economies surrounding the dilemma of choosing what next to read, Davey’s self-analysis comes by a process of self-deception. It emerges in the margins of her research. At the end of Les Goddesses, Davey divulges that there was a period of roughly ten years when she stopped taking photographs of people at the very time when photography was under attack from theories ‘dismantling photography’s truth value’. She surmises that this was due to her reticence to tell her own story. A series of 25 photographs (‘Subway – writers III’, 2011) – folded, stamped and mailed to the gallery – were shown alongside the film. Comprising snapshots of commuters writing while travelling on the subway, they seem an uneasy return to photographing people. Oblivious to the camera, rapt in concentration these strangers – filling in crosswords, paying bills, reading – could just as easily be Davey herself.
Caims, Steven, Moyra Davey, www.artforum.com, NYC, October 18, 2011. Moyra Davey GREENGRASSI 1a Kempsford Road (off Wincott Street) September 17–October 29 Moyra Davey, Les Goddesses, 2011, still from a color video in HD, 61 minutes. Moyra Davey’s HD video Les Goddesses (all works 2011) is a nearly hour-long exploration of psychological space. Recorded in her New York apartment, the work feels by turns claustrophobic and melancholic as it charts the links between her life and that of eighteenthcentury British writer and protofeminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Binding the piece together is the artist’s on-screen narration, her repetition of a prerecorded monologue that she wrote, which is fed to her through a handheld recorder. Davey’s dependence on this device creates an uneasy and slightly unhinged mood; she stumbles to deliver the lines and keep up with the playback speed. As she listens to her own voice and repeats her own words, she effectively weaves an element of doubt over her story’s accuracy, primarily through an attempt to mirror dates and family relationships. The show also includes photographs Davey took on the New York subway, each capturing an unaware passenger in the act of writing. Part of the series “Subway – writers,” these hang on the gallery wall, bearing the stamps and labels of their unconventional delivery—Davey mailed them individually and without wrapping. While the occurrences depicted in the photographs are uncommon, the personal isolation attained by putting pen to paper in public resonates with Davey’s domestic acts. Her identification with these strangers subtly links the genres of portraiture, biography, and autobiography, forming an uncertain and intriguing selfportrait. — Steven Cairns
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Teasdale, Paul, Moyra Davey, Frieze, #44, London ... - Greengrassi

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