life without sheets of paper to be scribbled on is masterpiece - Camden Art Centre

Canadian artist Moyra Davey works across photography, film and writing to create intimate, flâneur-like visual essays on the everyday passing of time and her filtered relationship to literature.

Davey’s camera often turns towards the overlooked discards and detritus of daily life while she recounts narratives from her collection of novels and philosophy books, weaving these with anecdotes from her lived present and reflections on her relationships with family, literary influences, psychoanalysis, travels and her personal surroundings.

Four video works elucidate Davey’s investigations into text, in particular her fascination with Mary Wollstonecraft, the Shelley sisters, Jean Genet and other literary and philosophical figures. The exhibition presented a major recent work in its entirety, Subway Writers. This series of photographs of commuters writing on the New York subway draws on the history of mail art; creased, stamped and scuffed after being posted directly to Camden Arts Centre, they retain a physical record of their journey.

The exhibition was accompanied by a publication of Moyra Davey’s writing, I’m Your Fan, edited by Camilla Wills.

 

Images Related events

The Playlist: Moyra Davey

Wednesday 30 April, 7.00 – 10.00pm
For the duration of the exhibitions, the Café opened until 10.00pm on Wednesday and selected artists have put together the soundtrack for the evening. Sometimes live, always interesting, the Playlist is the best jukebox there is.

Full list of Playlist artists:

16 April: Georgie Manly
23 April: Phillip Lai
30 April: Moyra Davey
7 May: A Practice for Everyday Life
14 May: Caroline Achaintre
21 May: Serena Korda
28 May: Judith Brocklehurst
4 June: Jesse Wine
11 June: Zoe Leonard
18 June: Camilla Wills
25 June: James Smith

Reading Group

Wednesday 14 May, 7.00 – 8.30pm
Promiscuity, love, identity and the virus as format

Camilla Wills, editor of I’m Your Fan, led three monthly book club sessions, discussing texts which respond to themes prevalent in Moyra Davey’s work.

More important to me than fidelity and adherence to a medium is a kind of devotion to promiscuity (to lift that concept once again from the lexicon of Gregg Bordowitz), an embrace of materials, formats, histories and genres, and lastly but perhaps most importantly, an investment in language. I am a believer in heterogeneity as an enabler and enhancer of the story wanting to be told.
Moyra Davey, ‘Caryatids and Promiscuity’

TEXTS
Moyra Davey I’m Your Fan – Douglas Crimp transcript and ‘Caryatids and Promiscuity’
Douglas Crimp ‘How to have promiscuity in an epidemic’ October vol 43
Gregg Bordowitz Imagevirus excerpt
Brian Kuan Wood ‘Is it Love?’ eflux issue 53

The reading group took place on Wednesdays 23 April, 14 May & 18 June and was been programmed alongside Moyra Davey’s exhibition life without sheets of paper to be scribbled on is masterpiece. Participants were encouraged to read the texts ahead of the session, and attend as many of the three sessions that they could.

The exhibition was accompanied by a publication of Moyra Davey’s writing, I’m Your Fan, co-published by Camden Art Centre and Camilla Wills.

#lifewithoutsheets

Café opened until 10.00pm with The Playlist by Caroline Achaintre

Reading Group

Wednesday 18 June, 7.00 – 8.30pm
Camilla Wills, editor of I’m Your Fan, led three monthly book club sessions, discussing texts which respond to themes prevalent in Moyra Davey’s work.

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle / Six volumes / Memory clinic / final session

Very broadly the previous reading groups have considered how to turn personal phenomena (the example) and identity (promiscuity) into method. These Knausgaard reviews were selected to think about the volume and power of descriptive writing, radical transparency, and how the labour of memory can be used to examine and dramatise the present, or read signals from the future. Whether they are moments of recognition or mis-recognition, memories are transactions that affirm without necessarily being accurate. There is no stable frame around Knausgaard’s memoirs, such as a present core to which he always returns or writes from, digressions within digressions are threaded together to find a deeper historical truth. Local resident Diana Athill, who has written six volumes of memoirs herself, joined the group to reflect on these questions, and on her experiences of working with Jean Rhys among other writers. At the end of the session some excerpts from Marc Karlin’s For Memory (1986) were screened. spiritofmarckarlin.com

TEXTS
James Wood, ‘Total Recall’, review of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Book 1), The New Yorker, August 2012
Sheila Heti, ‘So Frank’, review of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Book 2), London Review of Books, January 2014
JW McCormack, ‘Fjordian Slip’, review of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Book 2), The New Inquiry

Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (excerpt) in Moments of Being, Pimlico 2002

The reading group took place on Wednesdays 23 April, 14 May & 18 June and was been programmed alongside Moyra Davey’s exhibition life without sheets of paper to be scribbled on is masterpiece. Participants were encouraged to read the texts ahead of the session, and attend as many of the three sessions that they can.

The exhibition was accompanied by a publication of Moyra Davey’s writing, I’m Your Fan, co-published by Camden Art Centre and Camilla Wills.

#lifewithoutsheets

Café opened until 10.00pm with The Playlist by Camilla Wills

Exhibition Tour: Sophie Williamson

Sunday 29 June, 3.00 – 4.00pm
Sophie Williamson, Exhibitions Organiser at Camden Art Centre, led a tour of the exhibitions on the final day.

Moyra Davey: life without sheets of paper to be scribbled on is masterpiece

Phillip Lai: Besides

#lifewithoutsheets / #besides