Suzanne Moxhay lives and works in London. After completing a BA Hons in Painting at Chelsea College of Art she went on to The Royal Academy Schools where she graduated with a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art in 2007.
She has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally since 2002 and her work is held in many significant public and private collections including the University of the Arts Collection, The Royal Academy of Arts, The Cooper Union New York, the FSC, the Lodeveans Collection and Oxford University. She has featured in numerous publications including The Guardian, A-N Magazine and Art World Magazine and has been profiled and interviewed on the BBC Culture Show.
Exhibitions include ‘Saatchi’s New Sensations/ The Future Can Wait’ at Victoria House, London, ‘Afternoon Tea’ WW Gallery at the Venice Biennale and ‘GSK Contemporary: Earth Art of a Changing World’ at the Royal Academy of Arts. Her animation work has been shown as part of the programme ‘Do Billboards Dream of Electric Screens?’ on BBC public screens in cities across the UK and she has had two prints commissioned by the Royal Academy of Arts.
Last year she had a solo exhibition in Milan and was nominated for the prestigious ‘BNL Paribas Award’ at the MIA Art Fair, Milan.
Moxhay produces unsettling photographic work that occupies a middle ground between the staged picture, the tableau vivant, the dream like unreality of a film still and the hyper reality of reportage. This tension between a highly controlled artistic process and an end result that leaves the viewer with a narrative urge to understand and interpret the image they are confronted with is a trait shared with much contemporary art photography. From the mock realism of British photographer Hannah Starkey to the highly elaborate filmic work of American Gregory Crewdson, a manipulated ‘reality’ plays with the audience’s expectations. Moxhay’s work is often rooted in an imaginative, dream landscape where civilisation is at once present but simultaneously absent from the work. They call to mind the visionary writing of J. G. Ballard or genre films, like the western or horror movie, parallel worlds with their own rules and conventions. These constructed landscapes seem to exist outside of a specific history yet offer ambivalent and very knowing versions of the apocalyptic. In a sense they have a link to a Ballardian sense of science fiction: a fantastic story that speaks in the present tense to make the most of its closeness to the folk tale and parable, providing a bridge between the private psyche and the public world.
Moxhay has made work by building miniature “flats”, similar to early film sets, which are then incorporated as layers through various processes of digital manipulation. The resulting photos blend illusory and real space, leaving the viewer uncertain about scale or depth, which she says “appear to hover between the miniature and the epic”. By using archaic source material from her vast archive of images collected from travel brochures and adverts as well as the National Geographic Magazine and photographic journals the work has a familiar yet destabilising relationship to the present. Often from the 1950s to 1970s, their obsolete colour palette adds artificiality while the quality of the printing, without contemporary sharpness, gives a sense of temporal distance. Moxhay started out on her art career as a painter at Chelsea School of Art, whilst her current work developed whilst at the Royal Academy Schools and in residency at the Florence Trust, retains a strong painterly quality.
It is perhaps inevitable for an artist whose work is so filmic, that the artist has started experimenting with moving images. However, even here the movement has a strange recurring dream like quality. Aeroplanes swarm across the desert sky, more biblical plague of locusts than precision military strike. An endless tracking shot through a totally fictitious forest feels like a queasily foreboding sleepwalk to nowhere.
The work exists in a world of its own though the links to current conflicts and apocalyptical visions of the future are not hard to find. What gives the work its real power is its ability to sidestep reductive readings and persist in the memory. These are less about real spaces much more about the psychological landscapes we all inhabit.
She has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally since 2002 and her work is held in many significant public and private collections including the University of the Arts Collection, The Royal Academy of Arts, The Cooper Union New York, the FSC, the Lodeveans Collection and Oxford University. She has featured in numerous publications including The Guardian, A-N Magazine and Art World Magazine and has been profiled and interviewed on the BBC Culture Show.
Exhibitions include ‘Saatchi’s New Sensations/ The Future Can Wait’ at Victoria House, London, ‘Afternoon Tea’ WW Gallery at the Venice Biennale and ‘GSK Contemporary: Earth Art of a Changing World’ at the Royal Academy of Arts. Her animation work has been shown as part of the programme ‘Do Billboards Dream of Electric Screens?’ on BBC public screens in cities across the UK and she has had two prints commissioned by the Royal Academy of Arts.
Last year she had a solo exhibition in Milan and was nominated for the prestigious ‘BNL Paribas Award’ at the MIA Art Fair, Milan.
Moxhay produces unsettling photographic work that occupies a middle ground between the staged picture, the tableau vivant, the dream like unreality of a film still and the hyper reality of reportage. This tension between a highly controlled artistic process and an end result that leaves the viewer with a narrative urge to understand and interpret the image they are confronted with is a trait shared with much contemporary art photography. From the mock realism of British photographer Hannah Starkey to the highly elaborate filmic work of American Gregory Crewdson, a manipulated ‘reality’ plays with the audience’s expectations. Moxhay’s work is often rooted in an imaginative, dream landscape where civilisation is at once present but simultaneously absent from the work. They call to mind the visionary writing of J. G. Ballard or genre films, like the western or horror movie, parallel worlds with their own rules and conventions. These constructed landscapes seem to exist outside of a specific history yet offer ambivalent and very knowing versions of the apocalyptic. In a sense they have a link to a Ballardian sense of science fiction: a fantastic story that speaks in the present tense to make the most of its closeness to the folk tale and parable, providing a bridge between the private psyche and the public world.
Moxhay has made work by building miniature “flats”, similar to early film sets, which are then incorporated as layers through various processes of digital manipulation. The resulting photos blend illusory and real space, leaving the viewer uncertain about scale or depth, which she says “appear to hover between the miniature and the epic”. By using archaic source material from her vast archive of images collected from travel brochures and adverts as well as the National Geographic Magazine and photographic journals the work has a familiar yet destabilising relationship to the present. Often from the 1950s to 1970s, their obsolete colour palette adds artificiality while the quality of the printing, without contemporary sharpness, gives a sense of temporal distance. Moxhay started out on her art career as a painter at Chelsea School of Art, whilst her current work developed whilst at the Royal Academy Schools and in residency at the Florence Trust, retains a strong painterly quality.
It is perhaps inevitable for an artist whose work is so filmic, that the artist has started experimenting with moving images. However, even here the movement has a strange recurring dream like quality. Aeroplanes swarm across the desert sky, more biblical plague of locusts than precision military strike. An endless tracking shot through a totally fictitious forest feels like a queasily foreboding sleepwalk to nowhere.
The work exists in a world of its own though the links to current conflicts and apocalyptical visions of the future are not hard to find. What gives the work its real power is its ability to sidestep reductive readings and persist in the memory. These are less about real spaces much more about the psychological landscapes we all inhabit.
