To Do Without People: Moyra Davey's Impossible Renunciation

The work of Moyra Davey is invested with individual subjectivity and autobiography. The distinct absence of any figures, however, in her photographs from 2003—along with Davey’s choice to focus attention instead on space, in its “empty,” uninhabited variations—harkens back to the decade in the artist’s life (roughly 1984–94) when, burdened by the notion of “image theft,” Davey retreated from the genre of portraiture. This talk by Jenny Wu, MA student in the Department of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences, will situate four of Davey’s photographs from the collection of the Kemper Art Museum within the artist’s most recently published meditations on craft and discuss her unpeopled interiors in relation to issues of ownership, medium, and the representation of time and space.

The program will include live closed captions.

Free, but registration is required (link to come).

A recording of the program will become available on the Museum’s YouTube channel in the weeks following.