We are living in an era of portraits: the held-at-arm's-length-iPhone-Instagram, the slightly fuzzy webcam profile pic, the Mad-Men-yourself-ed avatar. But artist Moyra Davey, one of the artists featured in this year's Whitney Biennial, has created a different kind of portrait, both older and newer than our everyday barrage of digital images. Davey's work "Mary, Marie," is a portrait of the Romantic writer and proto-feminist (and mother of "Frankenstein" author Mary Shelley) Mary Wollstonecraft, created from letters Wollstonecraft wrote to her lover, along with photographs and other images, which Davey then physically mailed to her own mother, sisters, and nieces.

Here she is, discussing her process in creating her work:

There is something so poetic in the way Davey has taken the original medium -- a portrait created through Wollstonecraft's  words -- and added her own dimension. Mailing the hard copies of her creations draws in another floundering medium, the increasingly-old-timey postal service. And the fact that she mails them to the women in her life suggests another way we create the stories of our lives, through the other people in them. After all, we are more than just our chosen snapshots of our faces. We are the people we write to, and we are the people we want to share with.

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