Bride

Moving between photography, film and sculpture, Sarah Mosca re-presents historical narratives to unveil readings and truths that may otherwise be forgotten or overlooked. Whether working with found images or producing photographs herself, Mosca is attuned to the image’s capacity to operate as a singular poetic gesture; as a cipher that can carry narrative weight. She upends our expectation that a photograph carries a documentary duty; images, for Mosca, can be illusive, seductive and mischievous.

Having long inserted sculptural interventions in her displays of photography, Mosca shifted to producing sculptural photographs in 2021. These enigmatic objects turn found images, stripped from magazines or books, into metaphoric monoliths. We start to read new meanings into these once archival images and begin to trace tangential associations between them. When placed side by side, the woman with the veil and the waterfall become twins; the transparent veil and the wall of water begin to echo one another. That these images of veils and canopies are printed on glass is not incidental. These are photographs we look through, photographs that hold and twist our projections. The play of transparency and the tension created between the legible and illegible is, here, both the narrative and material substance that the viewer must negotiate. As with all her work, Mosca is interrogating the very nature of photography and the trust we place in it to tell us truths. Subverting this impulse, she draws our attention to the medium’s fallibility and fragility.

Of these works, Mosca has said:

Standing in front of these objects or armatures you try to make a link. Most of the time it is about association. How the narrative or meaning of images, objects, or memories shifts by relating with or being in proximity to something else. How one thing acts when it’s next to another. It’s about gathering and collecting then reanimating and re-contextualising. Imparting a secret logic or poetic nuance. The photo-sculptures are composed of rephotographed images from art texts, postcards and found material. Gleaned images from jumbled places and times. Once disparate now becoming lines in the same poem. Operating somewhere between the logical and the absurd.