R O U N D  W E A T H E R

Molnar, all of whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors, writes “climate justice, climate grief, and intergenerational trauma are topics I’ve focused on in recent years.  These intractable issues tend to break hearts closed—my work aims to pry those breaks open so that we can [...] transmute grief to wonder in order to help shape and nurture generative new questions, feelings, and ethics about what it means to be human at a time of socio-ecological crisis.”  To see Molnar’s paintings is to be them.  You can imagine your own body making them: placing the paint’s entry, tilting the paper, letting water and color flow.  One feels the process of “working with river water, rain water, rocks, and photosynthetic compounds–and the way that these entities reveal their memories through my playing with gravity and allowing them to form rivers and ponds.”  Molnar’s works are a place we can weigh the most immediate and deeply timed of makings–a visitation of the world spirit.  Her New Earths, with their magisterial materiality, form harmonious and/or clamorous ecosystems where geological, physiological, and transpersonal processes intertwine.  We are each of us choruses of minerals and elements, and we take in Molnar’s paintings as the Earth’s song of itself. 

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The exhibition also includes cyanotypes from the series Desire Lines and Light / Remains.  These roving series were made in wild places of the American West as well as towns and cities in Transylvania and Poland.  They document Molnar’s travels through geologic and intergenerational time using light, pigment, and found forms.  Their intricate shapes reminiscent of ribs and organs occur in a medium that often looks like radiography; thus, each forms an x-ray of a place.  Each is the record of an artist serving as a site of vast temporal and spatial relations.  Ancestors and their landscapes often come through us in a flash. 

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