Moyra Davey | The domestic adventurer

New York artist Moyra Davey, who was born in Toronto and educated in Montreal, Ottawa and San Diego, presents The devotees at the Leonard & Bina Ellen gallery, until April 9. An exhibition on the work of a photographer, videographer and author with an original outlook on life. Domestic adventurer Moyra Davey is honored this Wednesday with the Governor General’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Eric Clement
The Press

When she was little, in Montreal, Moyra Davey one day lost the pencil her mother had given her for school. His teacher had said to him: “Why do you have so much trouble for a pencil? This question may have been fundamental to his career. If it illustrates the painful schooling she experienced, it also highlights how much the young Moyra already had a tender and poetic look at things. And a need for introspection – she who lived with six brothers and sisters – which led her very early to want to become an artist.

Moyra Davey is a daily columnist. A documentary filmmaker of life, of her own, of her reflections, of her emotions. With a look she poses with her photos, videos and essays. A look that embraces this poeticity of which the Quebec author Jean Désy speaks. This way of seeing life slowly and attentively. To better grasp its grandeur, urgency and singularity.

Moyra Davey’s work generates all kinds of reflections on our consumption, our identity, our daily choices and their effects. Her exhibition – her first presence in Quebec since the last Biennale de Montréal, in 2016 – leads us to grasp the soul of this original artist, celebrated in the United States, and whose photographic approach stands out for her audacity.

Two videos, one style

At first glance, one may be disturbed by the signature of her videos in which she stages herself, delivering a written text while walking in her residence. The form surprises, but we end up being conquered by its images and its narration.

In this exhibition – too briefly presented at the National Gallery of Canada, because of the pandemic –, two videos are to be discovered to grasp the style of Moyra Davey. But beware ! You will have two hours in total. The first video is called Fifty Minutes. Its theme is centered on the years during which the 63-year-old artist went regularly to see a shrink in New York. At the end of Fifty Minuteswe also wonder if her artistic activity will not have been more beneficial for her than her psychological analyzes with the D^r Y. “I think that at the time, I was quite immature! “, she says.

His video i confess is our favorite. This is a work that has been built for three years like a drift, the narrative elements having been grafted on to each other. His work had begun, as always, with a period of reading and then writing. It became a film that deals with the will for liberation, a theme that suddenly appeared after his reading of the novel. Another Countryby James Baldwin.

She mentions in i confess the fact of being bewitched by a reading. She deals with Baldwin’s fight in the 1960s for the rights of blacks and that of Quebecer Pierre Vallières, author of white niggers of America, whom she had met in the 1970s and whose biography had just come out. “It brought back memories of my past,” she says. The video indeed addresses the oppression she suffered at school in Montreal, at the same time. Harassment, bullying, racism.

“At the time, Quebec was different,” she says. People were fighting. The Anglophones were the oppressors. My father was from England, my mother was from the West. They decided to embrace the French culture, to learn French, so the children, we went to French school. »

That never stopped Moyra Davey from loving Quebec. And to return there, as an adult, in the 1970s (after his parents had moved to Ottawa) to study at Concordia and even embrace the independence project. “Without being very keen on politics, I thought it was legitimate,” she says today.

During the opening, she had a real pleasure to find one of her professors at the time, Gabor Szilasi, who had supported her attraction for the introspective documentary approach. “I remember showing him several of my photographs of staircases and alleys in Montreal. He told me that we always photograph ourselves. A comment that struck me. »

Interest in small things

In one of the rooms, a series of photographs of American 1 cent coins illustrates Moyra Davey’s interest in the history of small things. Rusty, scratched pennies with Abraham Lincoln’s face scuffed away. Money that she photographed before sending each photo, folded and stamped, to a recipient who then returned it to her. She built her series by associating the photos with each other with red sticky paper. The incredible existence of copper coins continuing through the postal mail. An allusion also to Freud and to the unconscious relations between money and waste.

Droppings, scraps, dust. There are many allusions to time passing, building and destroying, in his works. Dust on objects, this enemy dust of photography, symbol of entropy, of the disorder inherent in life. “Something you can’t control,” she says. Like this emotion that emanates from the works of Moyra Davey. This emotion that makes their strength, their magnetism, their seduction.

The devoteesby Moyra Davey, until April 9