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Fabula: North Avenue Paintings

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Statement & Resume

Newcity, April 30, 2009, pg. 23

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RECOMMENDED
Molly Briggs’ elegant, evocative paintings simultaneously call to mind East Asian landscapes, still life compositions, and underwater ecosystems. Briggs’ abstract figures, where familiar organic shapes transfigure and morph from a kind of blobby chaos, act as a kind of Rorschach test: are a group of waving lines on a hill a forest of trees or seaweed? The delicate balance between expressionism and representation leads to a changing interpretation of

perspective in scale and form, and the paintings are strongest when they make generous use of blank space to call attention to the lack of context the images have. Other paintings that compress figures into limited spaces are much less suggestive and more muddled. Briggs’ use of color is remarkable, where her muted palette is accented by bright fuchsia flashe, a non-reflective paint used for backdrops in theater, so that the paintings absorb light in equally surprising ways. (Monica Westin)
Through May 23 at Zg Gallery, 300 W. Superior

Art in America, September, 2007, No. 8, pg. 172

Eight Forty-Eight
Sylvia Ewing Guest Host
December 14, 2006

Molly Briggs, Fabula: North Avenue An Exhibition of Painting

"I wonder if it’ll snow on Christmas?  I love that serene, almost suspended feeling right after snowfall.  It’s so quiet, which makes the scene even more striking visually.  You get that same sense walking into this week’s number two to see.  It’s at I space Gallery, on Superior Street.  Chicago-based artist Molly Briggs has painted a room there all in a silver-gray, and along one giant, 23-foot wall, she’s created the delicate outlines of trees, painted in bluey-silver and a bright red.  The images of the trees, sometimes layered on each other, are actually portraits of real trees that stand along a stretch of North Avenue, from the far west side all the way to the lake front.  Briggs delicately renders each tiny branch, each subtle contour of the trunk.  And in a way, just like snow, she articulates that skeleton, shows you how fine it is.  The landscape is quiet, powerful, and so beautiful.  The panoramic image is actually eight distinct panels, and the artist plans to separate them when the exhibition closes, a week from Saturday.  So go to I space now, for Molly Briggs’s stunning reinvention of the silhouettes that surround us." (transcribed from radio broadcast)

Chicago Tribune, November 24, 2006