Moyra Davey, Spleen. Indolence. Torpor. Ill-humour. @Murray Guy

JTF (just the facts): A total of 8 photographic works and 1 video,  hung in the North and South gallery spaces and the entry area. The North gallery contains the video, Les Goddesses, 61 minutes, in an edition of 5, from 2011. The entry area contains 1 unframed grid of 25 c-prints from 2012, each with postage, tape and ink. Each print is 12x17, and the work is unique. The South gallery contains 1 unframed grid of 16 c-prints from 2011, each with postage, tape, ink, and labels with text supplied by Lynne Tillman. Each print is 17x12, and the work comes in an edition of 3. This gallery also contains 5 triptychs and 1 singe image. These works are unframed gelatin silver prints, sized 20x16, in editions of 3, taken in 1979. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Moyra Davey's unabashedly analog, through-the-mail grids seem to have touched a curatorial nerve of late. They are intellectual, autobiographical, engaged with the written word, and an antidote (or corollary) to the flood of digital imagery that has engulfed photography. Her grids were included in the New Photography show at the MoMA last year and are now part of the Whitney Biennial (both linked below). Not many can claim that double play in such a short time span.

In this new show, Davey offers two recent grids, a video, and a selection of earlier vintage work. The Trust Me grid is a collection of still lifes: the contents of a medicine cabinet, a blue glass bottle, a group of shopping bags, a tiled wall, bugs caught in a spider web, strands of hair on the edge of a bathtub, a stuffed animal bunny, which are then woven together into a kind of anti-narrative form with snippets of text by Lynne Tillman. They are pictures about stories, rather than stories themselves. The Subway Writers grid is more literal; strangers on the subway read with a pencil, scribble in notebooks, or get lost in words amidst the chaos around them. They float in thought bubbles, oblivious to the din. It is writing as refuge from the crowd.

The vintage black and white photographs the South gallery have a Brown Sisters feel to them, but with an undercurrent of simmering sibling hostility. Four dark haired sisters pose in matching striped shirts, but there is a subtle closed reluctance here, a dark, arms crossed grudging compliance. Bodies are cut down into arrays of tattoos or tank tops in other shots, but the mix of familial emotions is never far from the surface. Davey probes some of this historical terrain in the video, Les Goddesses, where autobiographical scenes of family and close friends are examined via more cerebral investigations of various texts and essays. Her approach to telling (and/or reading) her personal story is inextricably mixed with a more rigorous arms length analysis.

I think the appeal of Davey's work at this particular moment in photographic history derives from the earnestness with which she is digging into the relevance of the photographic image in one's own personal history, as well as its connections to the written word as part of an overall redefined narrative form. In a time when the digital age is threatening to dumb down our discourse, Davey is re-exploring her own relationship with photography in a serious, high-minded, and thoughtful manner.

Collector's POV: The prices for the works in this show are as follows. The grid in the entry space is $40000, while the grid in the South gallery is $45000. The vintage prints from 1979 are $18000 each. Davey's work has not yet reached the secondary market, so gallery retail is still the only viable option for interested collectors at this point.

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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

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Transit Hub:

• Exhibits: New Photography 2011 @MoMA (here), Whitney Biennial 2012 (here)

Moyra Davey, Spleen. Indolence. Torpor. Ill-humour.
Through May 6th

Murray Guy
453 West 17th Street
New York, NY 10011

New Photography 2011 @MoMA

JTF (just the facts): A group show of the work of six contemporary photographers, variously framed and matted, and hung in a two room divided gallery on the 3rd floor. The exhibit was curated by Dan Leers. (Installation shots at right.)

The following photographers have been included in the show, with the number of works on view and image details in parentheses:

• Moyra Davey (2 works, consisting of grids of 25 and 16 c-prints respectively, unframed and pinned directly to the wall, from 2010-2011)
• George Georgiou (8 pigmented inkjet prints, framed in white and unmatted, from 2006-2007)
• Deana Lawson (7 pigmented inkjet prints, framed in white and unmatted, from 2007-2010)
• Doug Rickard (8 pigmented inkjet prints, framed in white and unmatted, from 2009-2011)
• Viviane Sassen (8 pigmented inkjet prints, variously framed and unmatted, various sizes, from 2006-2010)
• Zhang Dali (20 gelatin silver prints, with photomechanical reproductions and type written text, framed in white and matted, from 2003-2011)

Comments/Context: There's a little bit of everything in this year's New Photography exhibit at the MoMA, making it much broader and more inclusive than other recent incarnations of this annual survey. Rather than highlighting a particular theme or grouping similar/contrasting approaches, this show runs the gamut from documentary to digital appropriation, with relatively equal measures of conceptual and straight photography, offering us diversity and divergence as opposed to a particular institutional point of view. The implication is that the medium is expanding and extending in so many directions that it's impossible to use any one narrow definition anymore, and there's quality and innovation to be found in a plethora of styles and working methods.

In terms of sheer visual elegance, Viviane Sassen's photographs are far and away the most successful. Her pictures have a perplexing, mesmerizing magic, where simple forms and odd compositional angles create an atmosphere of the unexpected. Orange soda is poured into a hole in the sidewalk, a boy lies tipped over in a blue plastic chair, a paper bursts into flames in front of a subject's face, and a woman's body lies draped in a light blue sheet. Seemingly normal subjects take on an air of confusing mystery, and decoding some kind of plausible narrative becomes tricky, pushing the viewer back into an exploration of the lines, color, and space of the formal elements of the pictures. The enigmatic, unknowable secrets of the images give them a power that goes far beyond their straightforward appearance.

I think the opposite wall pairing of Doug Rickard and Zhang Dali was an inspired connection of related ideas, where elusive photographic truth and power-driven propaganda mix with surveillance, privacy, and the omniscience of the digital Internet. Rickard's photographs are full of thorny conceptual questions, from how they were made (appropriated from Google Street View and then selected/cropped/reframed) to what they might represent (the digital embodiment of "everything", the intrusion on the edges of personal freedoms, and the details of suburban decline which they so clearly document). All of the works look downward from the all-seeing robot cameras, finding a depressing array of rusting cars, muddy lots, wayward youths, and poverty stricken streets, unvarnished and exposed to the eyes of the Internet. Zhang's pictures are proof positive of deliberate photographic censorship and alteration in a more political sense, where history and collective memory get changed by airbrushing out undesirables. Photo ops of Chairman Mao are retouched and enhanced, simplifying the visual story, collaging together separate parts, or cropping out distractions to get to a new kind of truth. Both sets of work consider the nature of documentatio, manipulation and archival memory, and standing between them, the resonance of interchangeable ideas is very strong.
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The remaining works by Moyra Davey, Deana Lawson, and George Georgiou are all accomplished in their own ways (although slightly less exciting to my eye/brain), ranging from voyeuristic portraiture to documentary photography capturing the dichotomies of old/new, returning all the way back to a pleasingly retro, analog dip into the tangible. Davey's intellectual taxonomies of bare bulb light fixtures and book bindings/empty coffee cups are much better in grid form than in the long around-the-room hang of her last gallery show; the visual echoes and repeated patterns of tape are much more apparent.

All in, this show has a something-for-everyone safety that makes it approachable, while still educating viewers about the complex heterogeneity of the contemporary photographic world. In the future, I think this incarnation of the New Photography series will be remembered as a coming out party for Viviane Sassen, and as a further validation of the artistic white space created by Internet driven digital imagery, as embodied by the work of Doug Rickard.

Collector's POV: Given this is a museum show, there are of course no prices. The photographers in the show are represented by the following galleries:

• Moyra Davey: Murray Guy (here)
• George Georgiou: unknown
• Deana Lawson: unknown
• Doug Rickard: Yossi Milo (here)
• Viviane Sassen: Motive (here), Stevenson (here)
• Zhang Dali: Eli Klein (here)

None of these artists has any significant secondary market track record, so gallery retail will likely be the only option for acquiring their work in the short term.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Exhibition site (here)
• Reviews: NY Times (here), New Yorker (here), Time LightBox (here), PhotoBooth (here)
• George Georgiou artist site (here)
• Deana Lawson artist site (here)
• Doug Rickard artist site (here)
• Viviane Sassen artist site (here) 

New Photography 2011
Through January 16th

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019

Moyra Davey, My Necropolis @Murray Guy

JTF (just the facts): A total of 53 photographic works and 1 video, variously framed and matted, and hung in two separate gallery spaces and the back office area. The South gallery contains 18 individual c-prints and a grid of 54 gelatin silver prints hung as one work. The c-prints are sized 20x20, 24x20 (or reverse), or 24x18, and are printed in editions of 3, 5, or 10; these works were made between 1990 and 2003. The black and white images in the grid are 3.5x5 each, and were made between 1996 and 2000; this work is unique.

In the North gallery, the main focus is a series of 32 c-prints hung edge to edge without frames, circling the space. Each image is 12x18, and has been folded, taped, and sent via the mail; all were made in 2009. The images are available as the original objects and in editions of 3 as regular c-prints. Also in this room, a single cluster of 25 c-prints has been hung as a single work; the work was made in 2007 and is approximately 51x79 as installed. In the center of the room, a video entitled My Necropolis runs in a loop; it was made in 2009 and comes in an edition of 5.

Finally, in the back office space, a grid of 100 c-prints (sold as a single work) is hung against the back wall. Each image is 10x8, and the entire work (from 1990) is available in an edition of 2+1. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: The overall feeling of Moyra Davey's new show is something like reading someone else's daily journal, minus the interior monologue of events and emotions. What is left is a series of understated scenes of day to day living, modest moments that caught the artist's eye or were examined with an unusual level of curiosity, often with a hint of nostalgia. Time is passing before our eyes, but it is doing so slowly, so we can catch the subtle details before they slip away.

This exhibit is a sampler of sorts, providing a few examples of various earlier projects as background, along with a larger body of new work. Ancient stereo equipment, dense racks of albums, empty liquor bottles, and a hodgepodge of apartment interiors tell small stories of domesticity. Enlarged Lincoln pennies (Copperheads), covered in rust, dirt, and other chemical residues, scraped, scratched, bumped, and discolored, become humble worn sculptures, evidence of adventures long gone.

Davey's newer work continues many of these same themes. Coffee cups, gravestones, clocks, keys, books, maps and other desk details all come together to recount an intellectual life in Paris. The images that were folded up, taped shut, and mailed to friends, have now been unfolded and displayed together, where the patterns and repetitions of ideas become more visible. The video on view covers similar territory: tombs, monuments, and parks, held still for a few moments and then replaced by another fragment or scene.

Overall, these works feel like an unassuming but carefully edited daybook, a gathering of simple, introspective images that are evidence of a mind scouring the details of life for meaning.

Collector's POV: The prices for the works in this show are as follows. In the South gallery, nearly all of the individual prints are priced at $5000 each regardless of size or series (there is one single image priced at $10000). The black and white grid of bottles is $40000. The the North gallery, the cluster of prints is priced at $20000. It is hoped that the Paris photos will sell as a group in some fashion; a group of 8 prints is $15000, a group of 16 is $24000, and the entire set of 32 is $40000. Individual 20x24 prints of these same images are $3500 each. The video is priced at $15000. In the back office, the Copperhead grid is $40000. Davey's images have not yet reached the secondary market, so gallery retail is the only viable option for interested collectors at this point.

While Davey's works don't fit into our collecting genres very well, I particularly enjoyed the large individual Copperheads and the Copperhead grid.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Interview: Big, Red & Shiny, 2008 (here)
• Feature: Carefully Aimed Darts, 2009 (here)
• Reviews: NY Times, 2003 (here), Boston Globe, 2008 (here)

Moyra Davey, My Necropolis
Through December 24th

Murray Guy453 West 17th Street
New York, NY 10011