Moyra Davey’s practice of photography is closely connected to the history and the experience of reading. In The Wet and the Dry, autobiography and considerations on the medium mixes with the lives of Goethe, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Shelleys. This text was also the basis for Davey’s acclaimed video work The Goddesses.

It contains the writing of Toronto-based artist and writer Moyra Davey. Davey presents a list of terms and episodes from her own experiences with texts and bound volumes, as they affect her photography practice. The pieces in this collection return to not only the writing, but the biographic and historic lattices that intertwine her and her family, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mary Shelley, Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin.

This is the second installment of The Social Life of the Book, a quarterly series about the contemporary state of the book at all stages of its production and consumption. Each issue is presented as a saddle-stitched signature to be collected and bound into a volume biannually.

Language: English