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"The canvas thread paintings have been part of my work from the beginning and they continue to morph with time and experimentation practice. This is my first time using unraveled threads as loose weavings but many of the other elements found in the work are reoccurring, such as collaborating with gravity; treating color as content; outlining figures to remove them from the realm of the real; thinking of linear forms as if they were entities; and using ultra basic optical illusions"
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Color and outline as content
"Thanks to physics, the hanging-thread works have a natural catenary elegance on their own; they require countermeasures to move beyond the given beauty. I approach each one differently, sometimes through depicting pattern or contrary shapes, or as in the case of these new weavings, using color and line to graphically animate the underlying form. For the large woven piece I combined an acid yellow with a grape purple - a tart, sharp, and arguably vulgarcolor scheme. By outlining each strip, the piece appears as a cartoon or depiction of itself. It performs itself. The outlining also puts it in nowhere space, the grid floats and it appears to hover in front of the wooden frame even as gravity shapes the strips and holds them in position"
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Linear form as entity
"Like the yellow woven painting, the red and purple painting is an arrangement of interweaving bands that remain visually self-contained, but instead of appearing as an interlocking whole, it reads more like a square dance of entities in a choreographed embrace. Again, the act of outlining transforms the piece from static passive material into figures with implied movement and suggested agency. The color scheme brings a florid romanticism to the piece in contrast to the spare and minimal form. To change the colors would alter the drama and reinvent its personality"
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Ultra basic optical illusions
"In a departure from the two other woven pieces, the pink and green weave optically transforms strips of threads into what appears as a solitary object. From a distance it suggests a graphic image in relief, a hashtag or pound sign, symbols with a practical application in information systems. Upon closer inspection the illusion starts to break down into collective parts of stringy fragmented color. It is a tension between conjuring associations of symbols and their cultural meaning and then dismantling them to raw material and remnant shapes"
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Dianna Molzan (b. 1972, Tacoma) lives and works in Los Angeles and will be the subject of a solo exhibition at kaufmann repetto, New York, in 2021.
Dianna Molzan experiments with new sculptural approaches to painting while maintaining an anchor in classical materials such as creating a handle out of canvas or restricting the painting to only the stretcher bars. These new approaches allow Molzan to marry the high brow of canonical painting materials with kitsch, or as curator Laura Hoptman called it in 2014, a contemporary "reenactment" of traditional painting.Molzan's work has been exhibited internationally in museum exhibitions at ICA Boston (2019, 2012); MoMA, New York (2014); SFMOMA, San Francisco (2016); and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2011), among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; ICA Boston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; University of Chicago; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.click here to know more about dianna molzan
*All text including in this viewing room are from Dianna Molzan, June, 2020
dianna molzan keeping it together with gravity
Past viewing_room