Thoughts are tangled.
Fragmented bodies strewn across the floor in an unruly cluster.
Limbs are heavy. Unresponsive.
Nothing really makes sense.
A solo exhibition of London-based artist Rebecca Molloy. For this ambitious site-specific installation, Molloy presents a new body of work that explores the lengths the human body will go to to have fun.
Largely formed of installations that combine painting, sculpture and video; Molloy’s works attempt to create an alternative understanding of the human form and its interactions with its surroundings. Absurdity and strangeness act as a starting point, where source material can range from Internet obscurities, isolated body parts, the pores of the skin and the spam like interference from advertising. The daily bombardment of images, videos and sound fuels the environments Molloy creates, where our perpetual desire for self-entertainment and stimulation is transformed into an alternative painted reality.
In Till Death do us Party, Molloy exploits the conventions of painting attempting to envelop the viewer into the sensations and transformative process that paint can allow for. Painting in this exhibition acts as a material of play, that is strewn across objects, flattened into graphics and revealed in new forms of whipped cream, chocolate milk and hundreds and thousands. The viewer is invited to enjoy the tantalizing nature of paint in all its forms.
Acting as an anchorage to the installation: video works sit in a constellation of sculptures and paintings. Focusing on playfulness and gesture, shifts of colour and various textures, a promiscuous narrative is devised looking at the role of the body, both physically and psychologically. Through some subtle, horrific and bizarre encounters, the work meanders through fun, partying and death, creating a squeamishly perverse and deliciously luscious world.
Molloy’s performative and seductive exhibition is compiled through collage and construction, allowing mis/understanding and reinterpretation of the physical and digital worlds. A strong element of gore and horror is present where fingers, limbs and the mouth reference the genre. A flickering eye glares over the installation whilst the imagery carefully selected thinks about painting in a much wider sense. Paint oozes within a screen and is slathered across the walls engulfing the vitrine into flattened Mario-type graphics.
Till Death do us Party is an amalgamation of meticulous research and fragmented thoughts initially explored during a residency at Trelex, Switzerland. With potency and a playful balance, Molloy tickles people’s eyes and seduces the senses. The work is loose and has developed its own rules. This is no normal party nor does it try to be one. It belongs in another place of existence, warping into its own reality that the viewer is cordially invited to.