Broodthaers Society of America
Two Films by Moyra Davey and Jennifer Montgomery
Wednesday February 27, 2019 at 7pm
Reservations necessary as seating is limited.

520 West 143rd Street, no. 2
between Amsterdam and Broadway
1/A/B/C/D trains to 145th Street

MOYRA DAVEY
Fifty Minutes, 2006
Video with sound, 50 minutes

Opening with the turning of pages, Fifty Minutes takes the form of an analysand’s 50 minutes of disclosure. The anxiety of post-9/11 New York rivers into a monologue on nostalgia’s relative qualities. "In critical circles, nostalgia has a negative, even decadent connotation," she recites, noting its origin in the Greek nostos, or "return home," and algos, "pain." Likewise, its German incarnation is Heimweh, or "home ache."

Both meanings are predicated on an inevitable return (home), where the pain of origination, and thus living, and of the human condition as a whole, is located. Davey’s own plumbing of her domestic interior and origins would seem to concur. Yet if nostalgia in the contemporary art world is glossed with the superficial – with the making of suffering something materially beautiful, often via the camera – it is against this, particularly in her often deliberately artless films, that Davey also turns. That a restless, weird beauty results anyway, sans sentiment, is a measure of her films’ significance.
— Quinn Latimer, frieze, May 2012

JENNIFER MONTGOMERY
The Agonal Phase, 2010
HD video with sound, 42 minutes
with Christopher Montgomery, Laszlo McKenzie, and Vivian Montgomery

In the aftermath of a death things may seem very quiet, but there are struggles going on so deep not even those who struggle can recognize them. This film looks and listens for signs of those struggles. Psychoanalytic interjections consider the nature of time and rumination, and are used to step outside of the terribly interiorized state of mourning.

The agonal phase: the visible events that take place when life is in the act of extricating itself from protoplasm too compromised to sustain it any longer. They are like some violent outbursts of protest arising deep in the primitive unconscious raging against the too-hasty departure of the spirit; no matter its preparation by even months of antecedent illness, the body often is reluctant to agree to the divorce.

Over the past three decades, Moyra Davey has built an increasingly influential body of work comprised of photographs, writings, and video. Her practice presents a wide-ranging model of engagement with the world: a reflection on possibilities of producing and consuming, on writing and reading, on novelty and obsolescence, and on the future of images amidst an economy of profuse reproduction. Davey has had solo exhibitions at the Fogg Art Museum, 2008; Kunsthalle Basel, 2010; Tate Liverpool, 2013; Camden Arts Centre in London, 2014; MuMOK, Vienna, 2014; ICA Philadelphia; 2014; and Portikus, Frankfurt, 2017. Her work has been included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial; the 2012 São Paulo Bienal, the 2016 Biénnale de Montréal; documenta 14, Kassel and Athens, 2017. She had five solo exhibitions at Murray Guy.

Titles of Jennifer Montgomery’s experimental film essays and features include One Species Removed (2013), Deliver (2008), Notes on the Death of Kodachrome (2006), Threads of Belonging (2003), Transitional Objects (2000), Art For Teachers of Children (1995), and Home Avenue (1989). Her work has been included in numerous international film festivals including those of Edinburgh; Rotterdam; Toronto; Vienna; Sundance International Film Festival, 2003, New Directors New Films, MoMA, 1995. He work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. He work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. In 2015 Montgomery’s films were on view in the exhibition Two Serious Ladies: Peggy Ahwesh and Jennifer Montgomery at Murray Guy.

For further information contact Janice Guy at 917293 3507 or email