MOYRA DAVIE: AMERICAN FINE ARTS CO • NEW YORK, NEW YORK
left:
Moyra Davie, untitled (file),1999 c-print
right:
Moyra Davie, untitled (pile),
c-print
Moyra Davie’s
first show at American Fine Arts Co was a series of photographs of newsstands
as taken from around the country. Her interest is in sites which function
as places of industry, and which have a place in our daily lives. For
her second show,
Davie has turned the camera upon her home and study, which are filled
with collections and agglomerations of objects. The mood that pervades
never seems to be manipulated but results in a natural consequence of
amassment or neglect—both very human habits.
Davie takes a very specific sort of photograph: a landscape which is
created not from visual tricks via technology but from objects themselves,
organized into sets and genres, or left where they are and portrayed
in such a manner as to allow a narrative to form as the immediate environment
which they populate and widens immeasurably. This is achieved with found
objects, which are in themselves a constellation of various visual elements
that are revealed through the focus of the camera lens. The eye of the
viewer may tend to rove through these images, searching for some element
of commonality, as for a referent to interests of hers that intersect
with their own. This was at first found by me in a trio of images: records/birdsongs,
records/glass, and records/greatest hits. These pictures were a cross-view
of Davie’s record collection, a historical rarity in this age of
compact discs and MP3s, yet also nostalgic. The arrangement of these
items, photographed in an almost posed disarray, shows a collection
of someone for whom the record cases hold a value as objects as well.
glad shows a pale yellow refrigerator covered with various pieces of
paper such as recipes or news articles, etc, and boxes of cereal, containers
of laundry detergent, and garbage bags are lined up along its upper
edge. The ordered surfaces and spatial areas captured in this image
stand in direct contrast to other images such as klh radios, tubes &
wire, scissors, coins, wire, and red thread, in which close-up photographs
shows how colors and textures are an equal part of her immediate environment
even when the object itself has an otherwise functional or theoretical
value.
These photographs are bound by the formal arrangement of her “set,”
and by the narrative that binds all of its physical elements together,
the sense of someone taking stock of their most intimate, immediate
surroundings, in which she learns not to take even a single inch of
area for granted. Davie transforms this area into a storyboard for intimate
passions.
David Gibson
New York, New York
2000
