INTERVIEW WITH FIRST LOOK 2025 ARTIST ANNE SOL: PALIMPSEST

We took a moment to dive into the artistic processes behind the artists in First Look 2025 to learn about their process, projects, and what inspires them to create work.

Your work blends photography, drawing, and mixed media. How did this multidisciplinary approach develop in your practice?

It keeps building itself, slowly over the course of memory, amidst instinct, reflection, obsession, collection, impregnation, fermentation, and accumulation. This series began over twenty years ago, evolving in layers until it reached its current form, completed a year ago. This work has been developing over a long period of time, and ultimately, it is this experience that we find here. The images come from a variety of sources: they were taken over the years, using different techniques, from film to digital, sometimes as part of other series. The oldest dates back to 1994, in Ireland with a Lubitel (a cheap Russian camera); and the most recent was captured digitally in Canada. Little by little, these fragments overlapped and merged, until they told a single story, a single narrative: that of the experience of memory. In a constant dialogue between memory and matter, I am interested in the way in which memory reinvents reality, and this exploration guides my aesthetic choices. I compose my works as one composes a painting: in successive layers, mixing my skills.

You mention that photography is just a first step for you. How do you decide when a piece complete?

When I manage to no longer see any difference between the past and the present. During the creative process, the first image I find in my archives becomes a new image. There is the initial intention when I took this photo, there is the memory of the moment when I captured this instant and the current vision of this memory. In the end, the final image is a summary of these three moments, sometimes separated by several years. And it is this long period of time that gives the materiality of my memory. To answer more directly, I decide that an image is complete when I feel its materiality; it is therefore a matter of reflection but also of instinct and intimate resonance.

Are there any particular artists, photographers, or movements that have inspired your mixed-media techniques?

Ive always been drawn to painters who work with photography and photographers who work with painting. A Gerhart Richter exhibition I saw at the beginning of my practice particularly impressed me, and I became very interested in his work. Similarly, in photography, I was a great admirer of Josef Sudek (1896-1972), Saul Leiter (1923-2013), and Luigi Ghirri (1943- 1992), who compose their images like paintings, then Sarah Moon and Paolo Roversi, who invented a "grain," much like a "touch" in painting. More recently, I have have been following the work of Anne-Lise Broyer, who draws on black and white prints, and Dana Cojbuc, who extends her photographic images with magnificent drawings. I love when techniques blend and create movement between different disciplines.

What challenges or surprises have you encountered in integrating different media?

The biggest challenge is finding unity. As I said, most of my archives are very heterogeneous. I have images taken on film from the 1990s, on slides or negatives, with cameras of varying quality, and digital images, also in different formats. My work is to recreate an imaginary world where these technical issues are no longer an obstacle to exploring my memory. Digital technology, combined with new possibilities allowing very high-quality pigment prints, has allowed me to work with my archives as a raw material for in-depth work.