Copperhead No. 404, 1990/2025 by Moyra Davey

Copperhead No. 404, 1990/2025
C-print, tape, postage, and ink
18″ × 12″
Unique (11 Versions)

For more information, please write to zack@canopycanopycanopy.com.

Following the stock market crash of 1987, Moyra Davey started collecting one-cent coins found on the streets of New York and photographing them with a macro lens. “I’d just moved to New York, had no money, and was thinking a lot about the psychology of money,” Davey writes in Copperheads (Bywater Brothers Editions, 2010).

Zoomed in on Abraham Lincoln’s profile in relief, the works in the series seek less to monumentalize the lowest denomination of American currency—even as it faces discontinuation—than to draw attention to the physical records of the coin’s circulation: gashes, oxidation, dents, and stains. The Copperheads series asks how and why value is assigned to particular currencies, objects, and artworks. As Davey notes, “I thought of the Copperheads in some way as my own counterfeit, a deeply satisfying reverie of self-sufficiency, a bit like the shit-to-gold fantasy whereupon the dirtier and grimier the penny, the greater its potential for transformation and surprise.”

Copperhead No. 404, 1990/2025 has been created to support Triple Canopy on the occasion of the organization’s 2025 benefit honoring Zoe Leonard: a color photograph is folded, taped shut, stamped, and shipped through the USPS. Once unfolded, pressed flat, and pinned to the wall, the work bears the marks of its own distribution, much like the coin it depicts. (And, as of May 2025, the USPS is also being targeted for potential dissolution by the federal government.) The new works, addressed to Zoe Leonard care of Triple Canopy, constitute intimate artworks-as-letters from one artist to another—while foregrounding the systems of exchange and circulation that facilitate such connections.

Moyra Davey works across photography, film, and writing. In her practice, the quotidian becomes a site for critical inquiries into temporality, memory, and material culture. Davey has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and Portikus, Frankfurt. Currently she is completing a new film commission for The Jam Factory in Lviv, Ukraine, and working on a survey show for NBK, Berlin, opening in December 2025.

Photographs by Curtis Wallen.