Press Release - "Arrangements in Body and Boundary" by Molly Bounds
Molly Bounds
”Testing Water”
Oil and Acrylic on canvas
48 x 60 inches
2021
pt.2 Gallery
Arrangements in Body and Boundary
A solo exhibition by
Molly Bounds
Opening Reception
Saturday, October 9th
Showing Through November 5th, 2021
Schedule Private Viewing
pt .2 Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Molly Bounds. It will be the Los Angeles-based artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. In her latest paintings, Bounds examines the psychology of choice through a series of portraits, in varying degrees of presence and participation.
Arrangements in Body and Boundary considers possible movement scores for the body, not without weighing the outcomes first. Vacillating between possibility and limitation, half of the figures in Molly Bounds’ paintings seem to have reached a stasis. These pendulous stills in cold tones lengthen the duration of time in which they are made to make a decision. As viewers are forced into the perspective of a secondary viewer, they are held in similar purgatory — caught between frames of action.
Molly Bounds
”Movement 1 (Sure, anytime)”
Acrylic on paper
14 x 17 inches
Maple frame with museum glass
2021
Concurrently, corresponding figures are within the experience, embodying the spectrum of failure and joy in seizing those same moments. Unlike the muted palette and cropped forms of her familiar paintings, these figures exist in a world of warm and emboldened yellow, expressing capacity through movement, a realized ability to cast their bodies across the vast picture-plane has become apparent, in spaces both real and hypothetical. The newly activated postures and poses of this series are reminiscent of instructional images out of a self-help book, slightly robotic and rigid, forcefully affirmational, taking their first steps toward recovery. Through this progression of psychological portraits and gestures, the viewer is reminded, albeit reluctantly, that even the most inveterate narratives can be interrupted.