Mollie Caffey, MFA 2020

February 26-29, 2020

Opening Reception: February 28th, 6-8pm


garden for joan (angel i) 2019

all psalm (still), 2019


Artist Statement

This is a practice in activating the unseen body, an emotional body that is housed inside of the material individual and collective bodies. The unseen body is imprinted with everything that has ever occurred, we hold it inside of us, it is life force, it is too impulsive to ever become tangible. I am investigating the strength of this body and the infinite fibrous connections of it: in this way the work of spiders and webs, nets is extremely important to a translation of the unseen. 

The work deals in the precarious nature of all matter: the retention of memory and its subject to time and place, how the physical and temporal world seem stable and prove to be endlessly uncertain. I am creating a loop of relation through reconfiguration of objects, which opens up the opportunity for a shift in perception and perceptual change.

Based in the aesthetic and spatial concerns of theater sets, installation art, and places of pilgrimage, the work transcends fixed notions of what our sensorial experiences are supposed to be. In conversation with ideas presented through alternative realities, science fiction, metaphysics, and the philosophy of world-building, I embrace the liminality of time as it is tracked through personal and collective history. Religious and occult iconography and practices, especially around death and reaching unseen worlds of spirits, are a well from which archetypal narrative and imagery is drawn: to convey then question truths on which we build our worlds. 

Water, salt, rope, dried plant materials, wax, and paper are all important components of traditional rituals, symbols of purification, and materials employed directly in my work. Electricity is vital to this, as it is the unseen body contained inside of the corporeal, thus video and audio components are inevitable and imperative means of translation in the work.