Suzanne Moxhay’s photographic works have a disconcerting yet calming effect. By using found imagery from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Moxhay creates eerie fictional landscapes with a retro edge, their muted colours like faded prints from the past. But the world she portrays is almost post-apocalyptic; vast open spaces with no human presence reminiscent of a scene from Cormac McCarthy’s novel ‘The Road’. Is this Moxhay’s vision of the future or ‘The End’?
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‘Halcyon’ features wind turbines, pylons, the remains of an old petrol station and a thick fog that encases the land suggesting industrial overload, and in ‘Inland Sea’, ships sit in the desert as if the ocean has disappeared from underneath them. In ‘Highway’, she introduces an element of life in the form of a colony of bats flying in the direction of the straight road ahead towards the setting sun, perhaps heading away like everything else has done before them. In ‘Eryrie’ shows birds settled on a pile of the remains of a collapsed home which sit on top of what appears to be a landfill site.
Despite their unsettling nature, Moxhay’s dreamlike scenes have a deep narrative that leaves the viewer thinking about what has been and what’s to come. Whether they’re intending to be a metaphor for life and our existence, a comment about the environment and the state of our planet or just images of an imagined world, they speak out, which is what, paired with their excellent execution, validates them as complex and intelligent photographic works. Created by building and photographing miniature scenes and then digitally blending them with found images, printing with a soft edge is one of the processes used to create the all-important sense of distance.
Born in Essex in 1976, Suzanne Moxhay studied painting at Chelsea College of Art before going on to the Royal Academy Schools where she graduated with a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art in 2007. She was then selected for a year long residency at the Florence Trust Studios, London where she developed the ‘Borderlands’ series.
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 Cooper Union New York, the FSC and the Lodeveans Collection. Recent 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. She is currently a Print Fellow at the Royal Academy Schools.