“We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.”

Moyra Davey, January 6 – February 1, 2012

Reception for the artist, Friday, January 13th, 5 – 7 pm

The Donald Young Gallery is pleased to present a series of exhibitions bringing together the work of contemporary artists and the writings of the Swiss author, Robert Walser (1878-1956). Each month a contemporary artist will present work inspired by Walser’s writings to be exhibited together with archival material including first edition books by Walser, facsimiles of his microscripts and photographs of the author. Participating artists include Peter Fischli and David Weiss (December), Moyra Davey (January), Thomas Schütte (February), Rosemarie Trockel (March), Tacita Dean and Mark Wallinger (April) and Rodney Graham and Josiah McElheny (Summer 2012).

Moyra Davey’s contribution to the series opened on January 6, 2012 with a group of new photographs and a video. Comprised of photography, writing and video, Moyra Davey’s practice encompasses varied philosophies and processes of communication. “Subway Writers II” (2011), is a selection of twenty-five c-prints the artist folded and sent to the gallery in the mail. Unfolded and bearing the marks of their journey with tape, labels and postage, the images hang delicately in gridded formation. The photographs mark Davey’s return to the figure, finding subject with underground riders caught in the act of writing. “Les Goddesses” (2011) is Davey’s sixty-one minute film that weaves a narrative between the 18th century writer and activist Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughters with reflections from Davey’s own personal history giving entry to the artist’s personal interior and cerebral space. Together, the video and photographs exemplify the artist’s subliminal sensibility and refined sense of engagement.

Moyra Davey has exhibited internationally at museums and institutions including: The Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Canada Art Bank Collection and The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. The artist lives and works in New York.

A symposium on Robert Walser will be held at the Goethe Institut on February 26, 2012 and the gallery will publish a book with contributions from the participating artists. The exhibition is in collaboration with Christine Burgin, New York and the Robert Walser Center, Bern and Konrad Aeschbacher, Erlach. Sincere thanks to Bernhardt Design (www.bernhardtdesign.com). If you would like more information please contact Emily Letourneau or Robyn Farrell at 312-322-3600 or at gallery@donaldyoung.com.

Dunning’s work has long explored our ambivalent and often contradictory feelings towards our own bodies, including our attachment to bodily ideals over imperfect reality and our denial of our own mortality. These images exhibit similar contradiction and ambivalence, with growth perplexingly co-existing with dissolution. Seemingly fresh tomatoes dangle from a mold-covered vine. Turnips sprout new florescent green shoots even as they decompose. Burgeoning crops of mold bloom into explosions of colorful polka dots or overtake bowls of fruit like luxurious pelts of fur. The mold and corruption simultaneously seduce with their beauty and repel as grotesque and contaminated, creating a powerful tension in this work.

To Peach includes photographs from four separate series of work; Fall, The Dog and the Wolf, To Say It Isnʼt So and Somewhere, Somewhere. The formal and psychological connotations of To Peach, to double, to divide, making two from one, or a half from a whole refers in this show to the structure as well as the subjects of the photographs, but more, to a quality inherent to photography itself. To Peach also suggests fecundity through abundance of light and a viscerality. Letinskyʼs interiors and still life images examine the precarious relationships between ripeness and decay, delicacy and awkwardness, control and haphazardness, waste and plentitude. These dichotomies are made formally and materially apparent through Letinskyʼs scenes that are a kind of seeing which can only happen photographically.

Sampling oral history recordings captured between 1968 and 1978 of Brown and Hayek (they never met), the animation folds together a conversation that identifies their perspectives on how the ideal economic and social order for a nation should evolve. From a contemporary perspective, the conversation also reveals how it is possible for the mind to simultaneously hold incompatible ideas and how individuals like Hayek and Brown use logic to reconcile public theories and actions with more personal motivations.

The animation presents cycles of photographs staged in locations pivotal in the lives of Hayek and Brown. These include images of the Hôtel du Parc in Mont Pelerin, Switzerland (the location of the initial Mont Pelerin Society meeting in 1947 where economists, philosophers, and historians met to discuss the fate of classical liberalism and in their view, the crisis of socialism) and a triangular plot at the confluence of the Green Bayou and Houston Ship Channel in Texas purchased by the Browns in 1941 to complete a series of federal contracts to build ships for WWII. Intercut with these landscapes are animated images of old logging roads along the coast of Oregon composited with an animated 3D scan of the truck.

Interwoven with Hayek’s and Brown’s voice is a musical score composed by Mosley of single notes played on a 1938 Haines Brothers piano, matched to the piano owned by Brown’s family during this transitional period of growth in their business.