Moyra Davey at 259 Lake Shore Blvd – Toronto Biennial of Art

Moyra Davey, *Dark Trees*, 2016, 12 c-prints, tape, postage, ink. On view at 259 Lake Shore Blvd E as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019). Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy the Toronto Biennial of Art.

Moyra Davey, installation view of *Gold Dumps and Ant Hills*, 1992 / 2019, 12 c-prints, tape, postage, ink. On view at 259 Lake Shore Blvd E as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019). Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy the Toronto Biennial of Art.

Moyra Davey, installation view of *Dark Trees and Hoardings*, 2016, 12 c-prints, tape, postage, ink. On view at 259 Lake Shore Blvd E as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019). Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy the Toronto Biennial of Art.

Moyra Davey, "Hoardings – 1," 2016, 12 c-prints, tape, postage, ink. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York; and greengrassi, London.

Moyra Davey, "Gold dump #1," 1992, gelatin silver print on Agfa Portriga Warmtone paper. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York; and greengrassi, London.

Dark Trees and Hoardings both emphasize a propensity for locating the ecstatic sublime within nature. The latter two series emerged from an exurban region in Norway, where authors, including Mary Wollstonecraft and Karl Ove Knausgård—both vital figures in Davey’s work—spent much of their time in nature’s restorative embrace, later recreating their experiences in prose.

Photographs from Gold Dumps and Ant Hills document two kinds of excavation seen outside of Johannesburg, South Africa: one human-made and the other insect-Borne. The human-made excavation represents earthen residue from the region’s ongoing mining industry, which more recently gained attention for possessing toxic materials that threaten neighbouring communities.

Bio

Moyra Davey

Moyra Davey (born in 1958, Toronto, Canada; lives in New York, USA) works in the fields of photography, film and writing. She is the author of Burn the Diaries (Dancing Foxes Press, 2014), Index Cards (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020), The Problem of Reading (New Directions, 2020) and is the editor of Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood. The Shabbiness of Beauty (Seven Stories Press, 2001). A book of photographs by Peter Hujar and Moyra , with a text by Eileen Myles, was published in 2021. Moyra’s work is held in major public collections, including MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both New York; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and Tate Modern, London, UK. Moyra is a 2020 recipient of the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

Exhibition Site

259 Lake Shore Blvd East

The life of this nondescript building reveals the area’s economic history. Its first tenant in 1945, the Standard Chemical Company, produced methanol, formaldehyde, and charcoal. A railway line to the south tethered the site to the movement of goods. By 1954, the building was divided into a warehouse and a showroom, a configuration that remained intact over the course of various leaseholders, including oil and electrical supply companies and a series of car dealerships. (The advertising of its most recent tenant, Volvo, is still visible on the façade.) This building’s fate is indeterminate, as real estate development is increasingly filling the voids left by industrial decline.

259 Lake Shore Blvd East
Toronto ON
M5A 3T7