Moyra Davey
Mirrored Landscapes (Triptych), 2022

[In 2007, Moyra Davey started making mailed-photographs series]. The artist folded, taped and mailed her photographs to various recipients, collected them back and exhibited them in grids. Her use of the postal service is at odds with a period heavily invested in email. The traces of interaction that occur with mail –the torn squares of tape, smudges of postal ink and slight soiling of creases– highlight, however, how divorced communication in the digital age has become from physical human contact. The photographs’ materiality was emphasized through their display: they were not framed or glazed, but pinned to the wall. The works underscored a key condition of the photographic medium: its “objectness” and hence fragility and vulnerability.

Excerpt from Andrea Kunard’s short portrait of the artist published on the National Gallery of Canada’s website in conjunction with Moyra Davey’s exhibition “Moyra Davey: The Faithful” in 2020-21.