Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art

(Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art)

Sontag pointed out photography as inherently elegiac, and Davey further expresses its moribund nature-morte with a gloss of preemptive nostalgia. Like instagram filters made to affect 70’s grain on crystalline microlenses - implanting an artificial comfort into the cold of its technologic clarity - Davey went from photographing the dust and stains that mark human touch and embody nostalgia, to pre-placing that touch on the photographs, mailing them to package the touch that preceded them. Unlike Beshty’s copper marring conceptual emblems, the touch placed onto photographs re-re-re-inscribes photography’s loss of the human in favor of the sediment of it. Like Long Life Cool Whites, brimming with the ghosts photography’s past theorists, the book was pre-yellowed with the past brought to the present to fill it like Proustian remembrance of theorists past.  It’s all incredibly affective, like Sontag’s furthering Genet’s “the only criterion of an act is its elegance” with Wilde's: “the vital element is not sincerity, but style.”

David Robilliard at ICA



They’re flat in their half-humored, and accurate modern ennui. Doodled adverts of modern world of half-hearted enjoyment. An anhedonia of Nauman-neons made paintings. Posters of a gay vietnamese hairdresser who knows everyone, all the gossip, is invited to all the parties, and at night just can’t wait to get home and clip his toenails and curl his hair in front the glowing tv. The irrational slogans and trademarks of contemporary life. At once as splitting as they are banal as they are absurd. Both inspirational and defeatist. the work is waist deep in mire of bored tragi-comedy. There should be more, these should be in every museum. Like a Paul Thek who never got out of bed in the morning.