Moyra Davey Biography

Moyra Davey (born 1958) is a Canadian visual artist. Over the past three decades, Davey has built an increasingly influential body of work composed of photographs, writings, and video. As opposed to a current predilection for large-scale, digitally manipulated photographs, her seemingly modest works reclaim a practice of photography grown out of contingency and accident. Her camera often turns towards the unseen or the overlooked, as her subjects include dust, books, records, coins, empty whiskey bottles, coffee cups, gravestones, and people writing on the subway. Her practice presents a wide-ranging model of engagement with the world: a reflection on possibilities of producing and consuming, on writing and reading, on novelty and obsolescence, and on the future of images amidst an economy of profuse reproduction.