He turned, finally, to the book Moyra Davey published on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition for the 2018 Scotiabank Photography Award in 2018. It is the largest book by Davey he owns, like Index Cards an anthology of texts, but also a rich survey of the artist’s photographic and film work. While flicking through […]
I will continue to address him as a ‘you’. It feels more pressing, more urgent, as if time is of the essence (how strange that idiom feels when typed out and not spoken!). Of course, you, dear reader, know that I am a necessary fiction (another idiom that feels somehow out of place, out of […]
The most remarkable element of this exhibition is a slim volume that could escape notice….[an] enticing little 104-page paperback in the museum….Like a pocket edition, Burn the Diaries is designed to be affordable and accessible….So where does the reading stop and her life begin? This question gets raised early in Burn the Diaries when Davey […]
The woman making this film is writing on the subway… It was a brief encounter; she was meeting some of you for the first time. The day before you left, she turned on the camera without asking. She is fascinated by you, doesn’t want to be a voyeur, knows she is doing just that, eavesdropping […]
Pessoa – you know the one, right? – isn’t here on these shelves, but his words are still here with me: To be great, be whole: don’t exaggerate Or leave out any part of you. Be complete in each thing. Put all you are Into the least of your acts. So too in each lake, […]
Joining filmmaker and writer John Waters and art historian Miwon Kwon as blurb writers for the back of the 2008 book Long Life Cool White: Photographs & Essays by Moyra Davey, introduced by Helen Molesworth and which my librarian received as a generous gift from the artist and writer, Moyra Davey herself, choreographer and filmmaker […]
With these dispatches steadily accumulating, as the books move from shelf to shelf or from shelf to bag to car to office to floor, I think it is time to reveal something that I have been holding back until now. My haunting of Lucius Fletcher’s living library – yes, that is now the name I […]
Indeed, all of Index Cards could be read as a meditation on reading and its relationship to labor (creative, domestic), illness, gender, history, and selfhood. The essays are rich with allusion (Genet, Walser, Woolf, Baldwin, countless others), though the references are handled without pretension—it amounts to an honest indexing of one reader’s very good library. – David […]
After about ten minutes it began to rain, and though Dalie [Giroux] didn’t mind, the umbrella was not enough to protect the camera, so we moved inside to a couch in the living room where we sat and talked, off camera, for hours, about her work, her writing and about ourselves, our early lives separated […]