Best of 2008

by LYNNE COOKE

Still very much an artist's artist, Moyra Davey has gained increasing visibility over the past year thanks to a number of group and solo exhibitions: in New York (where she lives) at Orchard and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum (which presented her first museum show this past spring.) Grouped into fliud ensembles, modestly scaled, self-printed photographs of nearly nothing-fragmentary glimpses of mundane, often domestic interiors-have become her signature. She has also attracted a following for Fifty Minutes, 2006, a self-deprecating, wry, razor-sharp narrative that revolves around a fraught case of pscyhoanalysis. Writing has, however, increasingly become her preferred mode: The Problem of Reading, a book published in 2003, suggests that her skills in this arena are as sure as tose she has brought to the making of visual imagery over the past two decades.