Trust Me | Art & Artists

In the 2010s, Moyra Davey began mailing color photographs to friends and gallerists, who would return them to her with surface abrasions, dents, tape residue, fingerprints, stamps, and creases—scars from the many hands and mechanisms of the postal system. The works in this series feature soft, interior scenes from Davey’s own Washington Heights apartment in upper Manhattan, and relate to the artist’s long-standing practice of representing her living space through photographs and film.

The work on view features passages from Lynne Tillman’s novel American Genius, A Comedy (2006), in which a recurring theme is the narrator’s sensitive skin and the relationship between scars and memory. The skin’s tenderness and fragility at times seem to mirror the narrator’s fretful anxiety, suggesting a kind of slippage between physical and psychic vulnerabilities, which is also foregrounded in Davey’s mailed photographs of her most intimate surroundings. In the pairing of images with text fragments, Davey’s photographs and Tillman’s words each take on an additional charge.