Tony Mott

About

Tony Mott's solo exhibition brings together a significant number of his recent works. In these new wall-based series he has focused on the human head as a site of ambiguous signification. We are constantly looking at dozens or hundreds of faces in our daily life. Some are familiar and easily recognizable even in a crowd; others are new and embody a mystery. Even if there are no two copies of the same face, there are cases of mistaken identity and people who remind you of other people. We can reconstruct faces from memory and create computer portraits, but we are also able to transform our facial appearance through permanent alterations or superficial modifications. If the process of self-identification is located in the face, its sight is not an unequivocal experience. In Mott's words: I have generated images from anonymous pictorial sources and blended them again and again so the exhibition comes from very few starting points and has been evolved from the many processes I have used. These include photocopying transfers, digital printing, photo emulsion transfer and resin casting. I have tried to make images that change as you look at them - ones that remind you of the moving image now used in advertising beyond the television and cinema and images frozen in portraits that make reference to those on Egyptian mummy cases and ancient roman frescoes."