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Suzanne Moxhay

Drawing with an archive of accumulated stuff, Suzanne Moxhay creates intricate and complex photomontage images. Her method was derived in part from the ancient filmmaking method of matte painting, where backdrops were painted sheets of glass and integrated by the camera using the live-action on a place. She builds up the picture in her studio using cutout fragments of the source material, which she makes into little point sets on glass panels. She subsequently re-photographs the sets and manipulates the pictures digitally, an act of reprocessing that takes them further away from their original context and broadens the narrative possible. Her source material is drawn from a record of collected imagery, from mid 20th-century magazines and books to contemporary found photographs as well as her own photographs and paintings. She works with the material, discovering points of connection between details, either through shared subject matter or formal considerations like following the path of light from 1 picture through another to make spaces, which at first might appear real but on closer review begin to dissolve. She plays anomalies -- of texture, surface, depth, distance, scale, movement and structure -- to involve the viewer in the construction of the picture, and to make them question it. In the finished work there's often an uneasy sense of a distance that does not quite fit together - both formally or conceptually, but possesses a fact of its own. One which we are unable to nail as factual or fictitious.

Moxhay (b.1976, Essex) lives and works in London.

Exhibitions include 'GSK Contemporary: Earth Art of a Changing World' and 'Constructed Landscapes' in the Royal Academy of Arts, 'Saatchi's New Sensations/ The Future Can Wait' in Victoria House, London and 'Individual Made Things' in Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth. Her cartoon work has been revealed as part of the programme 'Do Billboards Dream of Electric Screens?' On BBC public screens in cities across the UK and she has two prints commissioned from the Royal Academy of Arts. She had a solo exhibition in Milan and has been nominated for the prestigious 'BNL Paribas Award' in the MIA Art Fair, Milan.

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