Suzanne Mooney

Suzanne Mooney’s work investigates the very nature of image production. Through the use of various photographic processes, appropriated imagery, slideshows and diagrammatic drawings, she explores the medium of photography as a way of reconsidering how we look at the world through representation.

Mooney gathers and collates carefully selected images and objects that she uses as source material for her work. Her critical, obsessive and often humorous juxtapositions are essentially a form of selecting, categorising and reconfiguring of this material. This exhibition Photographing Girls continues Mooney’s conceptual play with the processes involved in image making from behind the camera, in front of the camera and the camera itself.

A new work, Photographing Girls (2007) depicts found images that Mooney has been collating and gathering from various sources including books, magazines, newspapers and the Internet. The sequence of images, shown at an intimate scale on a digital display screen, puts the photographer centre stage. This all-female collection of photographs ranges from advertisements to professional self-portraits. Taken out of their original context, these images reconfigure the gaze, making the photographer the subject and object of the work.

The large-scale vinyl works in the exhibition come from an expanded collection of diagrammatic drawings entitled Make Love to the Camera. Found in photographic manuals depicting how to photograph the female nude, here blown-up and outside of their original context, the diagrams no longer exist as functional drawings.

The works in this exhibition all explore the roles of representation within mass culture and analyse the medium of photography as a tool of exploitation and empowerment.

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