Moyra Davey (b. 1958, Toronto, CA) lives and works in New York City, and is a faculty member at the Bard College International Center of Photography Program.
Davey’s 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.
Her work was shown in Documents 14, Athens (GR) and Kassel (DE), 2017; SFMoMA, San Francisco (US) 2016; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (ES) 2016; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (US) and the Guggenheim Museum, New York (US) 2015. She has held solo exhibitions at Portikus in Frankfurt (DE), 2017; Bergen Kunsthall (NO), 2016; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna (AT) 2014; and Camden Arts Centre, London (UK) 2014.
Davey’s work is represented in major international collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (CA), The Art Institute of Chicago (US), Canada Art Bank Collection (CA), Foundation 20/21, New York (US), Fondation Stichting A, Brussels (BE), The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (US), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (US), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (US), The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (US), Tate Modern, London (UK), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (ES), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (US), The National Gallery of Art, Washington (US), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (CA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (US), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (US).