D ELI GHT S| THE ART WORLD
Making something of 2020’s ‘manic muddle‘ By Peter Simpson
Editor's note: Make sure to call a gallery before heading out, in case a COVID flare-up has forced the closing of location.
M
oyra Davey: The Faithful, is the National Gallery of Canada’s first exhibition devoted to the Canadian conceptual artist, and the timing may be perfect. The exhibition seems ideally suited to help make something of the manic muddle that has been 2020, a year of fragmented politics and fractured discourse, when everything seems tentative and vulnerable, when change comes upon us with destabilizing carelessness. It’s a year when it seems impossible to focus on anything, 62
for everything moves too quickly. Hence the fit of Davey’s work, of which National Gallery associate curator Andrea Kunard writes, “Fragments of stories interweave and images of images appear and disappear, sometimes maintaining an enigmatic relation to the narrated accounts. The camera — video and still — functions as a device of focus and concentration; the framing, movement and restlessness of the work reflecting states of being and consciousness,” Kunard wrote in the gallery’s magazine. The words almost sound like a description of the year, which has wound past us like jumpy images from a broken projector. Even Davey’s 2007 series, in which
she mailed photographs to people and then gathered them back up for exhibition, seems especially relevant in a year when the postal service has been a major concern in an unfortunately historic federal election in the United States. The Faithful will include 54 photographs and seven films that the New York Citybased Canadian has produced over her career. A highlight will be the 2019 project i confess, “an intimate portrait of the events that shaped Davey’s youth in Ottawa and Montreal in the 1960s and 1970s,” when her father was one of Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s advisers at the time of the October Crisis. “A highly topical film, the work intertwines stories and images that address the FALL 2020 | OCT-NOV-DEC
PHOTO COURTESY OF MICHAEL HARRINGTON
Michael Harrington’s show of new work takes place at Galerie St-Laurent + Hill Nov. 12 to Dec. 1. His work is fitting for COVID lockdowns, he says, as it addresses ”alienation, loneliness and the marginal male type.“
