DMG/NAS Award 2023

Anna Mould

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Dominik Mersch Gallery is ​excited to present Anna Mould’s solo exhibition ‘Soft Focus’ as the winner of the 2023 DMG/NAS Award. The artist works across media including painting, drawing, collage, photography, textiles, weaving, and machine embroidery to investigate how more than one ‘truth’ or perspective may be represented or referenced.

‘Soft Focus’ is a series of paintings based on conflict imagery sourced from hard-edged documentary and news media. The borrowed photographs and video stills have been pixelated – a digital process associated with the censorship of images for legal, moral or political reasons. Colour and composition have been abstracted from the social, cultural, political and commercial agendas of camera operators, publishers, broadcasters and their audiences.

As resolution is lost, as definition softens and edges harden, the focus shifts from a subject of global significance to a simple consideration of the image’s formal qualities. The pixelated image has been reduced, aestheticised, and re-rendered in paint on canvas, adopting a visual mode suggestive of modernist abstract painting. Yet, the painting retains some semblance of its photographic origin in the subtle shifts of hue and tone from one painted pixel to another, and in the use of colour determined not by choice but by the unfolding of real-world chaos.

The pixelated image scrambles specifics of identity, nudity, gore and violence, of state and commercial secrets, and politically and morally dangerous ideas. Does censorship neutralise this ‘extreme’ content, or does it present us with possibilities limited only by the extremities of our imaginations? Does softening our focus, looking through half-closed eyes, make an image more pleasant to view? Have these paintings been rendered safe in their abstraction? Or is the unknown and unseen disquieting?