The end of you is the beginning of the end of me

PS122 New York

2003


The Classroom @ PS 122 Gallery hosted an exhibition by Molly Larkey entitled "The end of you is the beginning of the end of me," consisting of fifteen large graphite-on-paper drawings and five clear resin sculptures that take the theme of suicide as their subject.

For this exhibition, Larkey painstakingly re-created drafts or sketches of well-known works by artists, writers, and musicians who have taken their own lives, using a process whereby the images are projected and enlarged, and then traced down to the smallest detail. Following these artists' hands through their acts of creation, and by extension, into their acts of self-destruction, Larkey creates spare, yet evocative documents of her performance of empathetic self-renunciation. Accompanying the drawings are five sculptures, each of which is a crystal-clear casting of an implement used to commit suicide. Displayed on black pedestals, the sculptures appear to be negative images of the original objects, their dangerous potential arrested through their conversion into aesthetic objects. By creating a kind of afterimage of these tools of self-destruction, Larkey suggests that the awareness of danger, physical or psychological, can be transformed into the sublime by offsetting it, as extinction itself becomes an object for contemplation.

Molly Larkey’s artistic process often involves a kind of self-erasure, conflating her identity with - and ultimately disappearing into - the surrounding environment, the identities of other people, or the artwork itself. The resulting works become metaphors for the way that art can rupture the distinction between our selves and our environment, reflecting the way the aesthetic becomes the sublime as our formulation of selfhood shifts in relationship to our experience of art. She was selected for The Classroom by artist and independent curator, Allen Frame.

The Classroom is an experimental project of PS122 Gallery, dedicated to showing solo projects by invited artists.  Emerging artists are selected by a curator and given the opportunity to present their work and to create an interactive or public component in conjunction with their show.