Free and Not Yet
DUTTON GALLERY, NEW YORK
June 8 - June 29, 2013Dutton is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Los Angeles artist Molly Larkey entitled Free and Not Yet. The works in the exhibition are based on Larkey’s interest in gift economies, to exemplify social and economic exchanges that present vital alternatives to capitalistic accumulation.
In gift economies a gift is a social/spiritual act that strengthens relationships between members of a community. These types of exchanges typically exist in cultures where it is recognized that everything that comes from the earth is free, and that it is necessary to replicate the primary act of generosity in order to maintain abundance in our lives and our social relationships.
Free is made of hand-built ceramic links that form an intimated endless chain. Double links from this chain will be given away to visitors to the exhibition – when a link is taken, it will be replaced by another piece. The work makes tangible the invisible ties that connect us – talismans of the principle of generosity. By giving away the artwork to visitors to the gallery, Larkey hopes to stimulate thinking about forms of economic and social organizing based on giving and care.
The work inevitably also brings to mind chain as a metaphor for restriction, oppression, and confinement. By making the chain in clay, the work transforms the industrial into the handmade; uniformity into irregularity; separation into connection, and indestructibility into fragility. The metaphor for oppression becomes a metaphor for co-struggle and interdependence – strengthening the links that connect us.
The Not Yet is made of steel that is forged, wrapped in linen, and painted. The resulting undulating shapes cannot be held down to one category. As you move around them, the sculpture becomes a painting, which then becomes a line, which becomes a shape, which turns into a symbol, which becomes part of the architecture. This fluidity points to how oppressive structures that benefit from an either/or have routinely denied the neither/both a space, a name, even a shape or form. In an act of imaginative rebellion, the work rejects the dichotomous, and reveals and insists on elasticity of form and function.
Larkey will be on site at the gallery during weekend hours throughout the exhibition to talk to visitors about economies of generosity and care, and to discuss concrete ways of organizing alternative economies and social structures.
