Molly Briggs

Recent Paintings

Clearing Paintings

Fabula: North Avenue Paintings

See Through Paintings

Works on Paper

Reviews

Books

"Clearing 13," Flashe, acrylic and ink on canvas, 36" x 76"

These recent works contain overlaid images related to 3 areas of interest to me—the interconnected histories and meanings of modernism, Darwinism and feminism. There is an aesthetic quality to the experience of investigating these realms in relation to one another.  The paintings represent this, the abstract, multi-layered experience of thinking.

Patterns and motifs in the paintings come from a broad array of sources within this umbrella of thought.  Examples include my own interpretations of non-visible physical phenomena such as protein folding; Steven Wolfram’s gridded schematics depicting his theory of cellular automata; designs from lampshades, throw pillows and wallpaper in my own and my friends’ homes; Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s descriptions of interrupted pattern in her 1892 story The Yellow Wallpaper; Agnes Martin’s grid-based paintings; and on a material level, Japanese Ukiyo-e woodcut prints of “The Floating World”.

Most of the titles are quotes from Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, a story understood in its own time to be simply a perceptive account of mental illness. The story was revisited in the 1970s by feminist scholars, who interpreted it as a feminist polemic, in keeping with the author’s intentions.  In 2003 the story can be taken still as a feminist tome, but a flawed one, redolent with the political and social failings of feminism, as well as its successes in transforming culture.

I am interested in science in general and particularly the theory of evolution as an analogy for thinking about how art is made. The theory has undergone conceptual transformation since its inception in the mid-nineteenth century, influencing spheres of thought unrelated to the physical sciences.  To roughly characterize the shift: the theory was once taken as evidence of life’s innate drive toward higher orders of consciousness or even to society and morality.  Currently, biological complexity is more likely to be understood as a consequence of expanding biological diversity – and diversity can also contract, and then expand again in a different way, which disposes of the concept of a linear progression of betterment.

These interpretations can be compared to opposing paradigms of how art and meaning are made -- by a clearly purposeful process, versus by an organic, multidirectional process.  These ideas parallel some of the differences between modernist and postmodern perspectives on society and art.  As modernism, influenced by the concept of Darwinian evolution, argued for the concept of human progress, representable by artistic form, feminism also developed as a model of social progress.  Events surrounding World War II served to disprove certain ideals of progress, including classist and racist threads of feminism.

In Japanese woodcuts, the floating world of Ukiyo-e represents artistic and decorative refinement and subtlety, as well as an illusory reprieve from the pressures of everyday life.  The illusion of such a haven – the pictorial illusion, and the social and cultural illusions created by geisha culture and Noh Theater – masks social and economic inequity, particularly for women.  The refined materiality of those prints is analogous to the refined materiality of the trappings of geisha culture.  And so rarefied, perfectly controlled and refined material qualities in those prints can be understood to implicitly bear the meaning of what is masked (social and economic inequity – that is, human pain).  In my paintings, thin applications of flat and sparkling paint are applied to paper, collaged over the linen surface, approximating the delicacy and refinement of the Ukiyo-e prints.  In this material way the works circle back to The Yellow Wallpaper, in which the wallpaper is understood to be beautiful, yet mask the hideous.

Ultimately I present a surface layered with illusions of space: physical space, historical space and the space between distinct yet entwined areas of human inquiry.

Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship, College of Fine and Applied Arts, Univ. of IL at Urbana-Champaign
Block Grant, Department of Landscape Architecture, UIUC
Partial List of Instructors Ranked as Excellent by UIUC Students,” UIUC

Provost’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Partial List of Instructors Ranked as Excellent by UIUC Students,” UIUC
Public Collection, Business Instructional Facility, UIUC
Douglas Dockery Thomas Fellowship in Garden History and Design, Administered by The Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) and funded by The Garden Club of America, GCA’s 100th Anniversary
Fiel Traveling Fellowship, Administered by the Department of Landscape Architecture, UIUC

Fellowship, Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL
Partial List of Instructors Ranked as Excellent by UIUC Students,” UIUC

School of Art + Design Faculty Art Exhibition, Krannert Art Museum, Univ. of IL at Urbana-Champaign, IL
Summer Show '08, Zg Gallery, Chicago, IL
New Views: Nature Captured, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Art, Wilmington, DE
C. W. Briggs, Vicki Briggs and Molly Briggs, Cinema Gallery, Champaign, IL
Group Think,  Zg Gallery, Chicago, IL

2008

2007

2006

2004

2002