Moyra Davey: Dust
@ Gene Siskel Film Center
162 N State St, Chicago, IL 60601
Opening Thursday, February 25th, at 6PM
New York-based photographer and writer Moyra Davey is known for her finely observed photographs of domestic interiors. Her graceful, straightforward images catalog life’s in-between moments and overlooked objects–still lifes of crowded bookshelves, empty whiskey bottles, and dust. In recent years, Davey has turned to video, combining her eye for the everyday with a literary voice. This evening, she will present two of these works. In Fifty Minutes (2006), Davey uses the standard length of a therapy session to examine her own history with psychoanalysis while also raising questions about autobiography, nostalgia, and the ways we all come to know and invent ourselves. In My Necropolis (2009), she explores notions of history, biography, and the memorial, by pairing images of Parisian gravesites (Gertrude Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, and others) with a lively, open-ended interpretation of an enigmatic letter written by Walter Benjamin from 1931. Davey, writes admirer John Waters, “will catch you off guard with her smudged, elegant, low-tech intelligence.”
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