NEW YORK, NY.- C24 Gallery announced the opening of their exhibition, Sites Unseen, new works by Cheryl Molnar, on view at the Gallery from Saturday, January 9th through Friday, March 12th.
Cheryl Molnar’s multilayered collage-paintings invite us into a universe of imagined worlds on draft in the intoxicating brew of memory and observation informing her practice. A native Long Island, New Yorker, Molnar came of age in the wake of the prototype for American suburbia known as Levittown. This Orwellian invention, featuring row upon row of identical houses, laid out in reproducible grid patterns, is but one primary element explored in the vista vortex of many of her landscapes.
In her creations, Molnar also includes features remembered from a childhood visiting family on the west coast, transforming her work into an idiosyncratic record of American 20th century land development. Collaging localized images from places like Palm Springs and the North Fork of Long Island together with the wild overgrowth of natural vegetation that persists in spite of man’s attempts to domesticate it, she reconstructs an experience of what it means to connect to an environment in flux. Her site specific recollections and perceptions combine to form a veritable “plot-topia,” where discreet, urbane landscapes are mapped out in grid patterns, offering the illusion of perfection in bite-sized parcels.
In the context of today’s digital art, Molnar’s handcut constructions, though deploying modern technology and digital imagery, are relatively analog, as MySpace pages are to today’s state-of-the-art interactive blog platforms. In her space, Molnar collapses a traditional sense of location and time, offering instead a surreal juxtaposition of elements to confuse and confound the senses.
Underscoring her inquiry is a creative process deconstructed through its transparency. Beginning by digitally printing directly onto large wood panels, she then collages hand painted shapes and strips of paper and meticulously cut pieces of photographs to create oddly surreal yet serene landscapes. These interdimensional portals conjure both sight and sound as they ignite conscious as well as unconscious sense memories. Cheryl Molnar’s creations offer a kind of “site-geist” embodying the precarious balance between modern society’s enmeshed relationship with technology, our primal connection to nature, and the unchecked interplay between the two.
