In the Studio with Molly A Greene

INTERVIEW

Published Oct 20, 2020

Molly A Greene's Studio

You grew up in rural Vermont, and now live and work in Los Angeles. How have these two vastly different environments influenced your work, if at all? 

I grew up in a very rural place and as a kid I spent a lot of time outside by myself. Solitude and being outside are still a huge part of my practice. I spend a lot of time walking and usually find the images that I want to paint while I’m alone outdoors. LA has been influencing my work in all kinds of ways. I’m really interested in the sky and the way the air pollution interacts with light. I find the way the air stratifies and the colors in the evening to be so beautiful and also a little horrifying because of how they are made and I’m interested in that simultaneous attraction and repulsion. More generally the landscape here seems to me to be a combination of artificial, profoundly wild and apocalyptic (sometimes all of that at once) and I think that has been a really helpful space for my thinking.

You have an accomplished academic background, what led you to pursue such a rigorous academic pursuit, and how do your varying degrees (none of which are in fine art) intertwine with your art practice?  

I think I stayed in academia for a long time because I was in denial about wanting to make visual work, but I guess I see the academic work and the visual work as different parts of the same project. For me, both are methods for formulating questions. In school I was mostly reading and writing about philosophies of the human, and the way that definitions of the human manufacture corresponding definitions of the subhuman, the non-human and the super-human. I’m interested in the politics and aesthetics of that boundary-making and the history of anxiety regarding the fragility and fictionality of the idea of the human (and all its attendant others). Eventually I reached a point in academia when I realized I couldn’t ask the types of questions that I wanted to ask with words and that I needed to ask them with images. I think I’m still orbiting the same conceptual terrain--the paintings are aesthetic questions or responses within these fields of thought.

Your paintings and drawings often depict a more surreal version of familiar objects, such as hair interwoven through plants, or draped over three-dimensional shapes. How do you take these familiar objects, like hair, plants, and flowers, and morph them into something more fantastical?

I have been using brown hair as a surrogate for my own body. I am interested in the way that hair is both visual and bodily, both of the body and separate from the body, both an object and part of a subject. In this way, hair lends itself towards urgent slippages, reworkings and inconstancy.

Brown hair is one of the most familiar materials in my life. Most of the people I love are covered in brown hair. I touch and braid and tie up and take down my own brown hair many times a day. I became interested in the project of making this deeply familiar material seem alien or strange and in how that process of defamiliarization might alter my perception of it/myself. This has been a way to think more broadly about the relationship between intimacy and alienation and the potential for movement between categories.

Hair is also conceptually helpful to me because the hair that I paint is bodily and fem, but also an object. I’m interested in animating the hair-objects or making them seem active and alive. Instead of contesting the objectification of fem bodies, I’m concerned with questioning the passivity of objects and by doing that, trying to mess with ideas about subjectivity and objectivity. I also try to animate the hair-objects in ways that resonate with my own experiences, particularly feelings of excess, porousness, paralysis, feral-ness, or constriction.

I see these paintings as proposals for a set of absurd mutations that attempt to locate the partitions that have been installed between what is natural and what is unnatural. Sometimes they are distortions of an individual form but often they are relational mutations, like plants and hair behaving or interacting in anomalous ways. I’m not interested in a teleological idea of mutation, or in mutations that serve a particular moral or ecological goal. Rather, I’m interested in distortions of these various proxies for nature that call into question the assumed naturalness of the original.

Most recently I have been interested in the process by which definitions of the human are triangulated using reference points from the categories of the plant, the animal and the machine. I am especially interested in the way human subjects are raced and gendered through their relative proximity to particular elements within this matrix. I’m interested in the historical association of flowers with white femininity and how both whiteness and femininity are interrelated with notions of the machine. I think of my most recent paintings as “plant machines” and I am interested in using these paintings to try to better understand the literal/symbolic dynamics at play between these categories.

You work very interdisciplinary, moving between painting, drawing, and sculpture. How do you choose which medium you’d like to use to execute your ideas?

When I get an initial image in my mind it’s usually pretty clear to me what way it’s supposed to go--it’s a little mysterious to me but I don’t often feel like I’m deciding anything. The image generally just seems to have a texture or materiality to it in the same way it has color or tone.

Do you have anything coming up in the fall or winter that you are looking forward to? 

Yes! I’ll be showing quite a lot of work over the next few months. I have a solo show at Kapp Kapp in Philly at the end of October, a solo show at Here Gallery in Pittsburgh at the end of November, and a solo show at Ramp Gallery in London at the end of January. I’ll also have a piece in the inaugural auction for Greenhouse Auctions in December.

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