SAW Prize for New Works in Critical Writing

I am delighted to announce and honored that I have been selected as one of the recipients of the SAW Prize for New Works. Along with 30 other artists and makers from Ottawa-Gatineau and the surrounding First Nations, I have been given a great opportunity to create a new work with financial and organizational support provided by Galerie SAW Gallery.

I have been awarded a SAW Prize for New Works in Critical Writing, and the focus of the new text that I am going to produce will be on contemporary artists in the Ottawa-Gatineau area. I am also very excited to see what my cohorts come up with for their new productions.

Moyra Davey at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

The Faithful, a survey exhibition of the decades-long career of Moyra Davey, brings together a body of work and weaves a dense web of references that warrants close readings. Working with text, video, and photography, the Canadian-born, New York-based artist examines her personal history and its connections to art, film, and literature to construct narratives that give meaning to her experience at the same time that they refrain from reaching any simple conclusions.

Moyra Davey, i confess (video still), 2019. HD video with sound (courtesy greengrassi, London, and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York) © Moyra Davey (photo: courtesy the artist)

At the center of the exhibition is a recent video titled i confess, which bridges an appreciation of the American author James Baldwin with a reexamination of Pierre Vallières, the Quebec writer who compared the separatist movement with civil rights struggles in the US. On the 50th anniversary of the October Crisis, amid anti-Black racism protests, its presentation in Ottawa couldn’t be more timely. Like Davey’s other work, it also reveals personal details of her own life, delving into her father’s possible role in the invocation of the War Measures Act, and her ex-boyfriend’s relationship with Vallières. 

There is a recurring motif in a number of the videos in the exhibition, where Davey goes over to an open window in her apartment and blows the dust off the top of one of her books. It is a ritualistic gesture that suggests we must repeatedly reexamine the past, our own memories, and received ideas. The complete text of my review of the exhibition was published here on the October 14 Akimblog.