Molly Davis: January 2024
Molly Davis has explored many avenues of art-making throughout her life. After earning a BFA (2000) in graphic design, Davis worked in advertising for several years. Later, Davis’s focus shifted to family after marrying and having children. This focus prompted her decision to obtain visual arts teaching certification. It was during her return to college when she discovered her passion for sculpture. Currently residing in Morgantown, WV, Davis recently completed an MFA (2023) in sculpture at West Virginia University. Davis has exhibited her work regionally and nationally, and was awarded an honorable mention in the International Sculpture Center’s 2023 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Awards. Since graduating last spring, Davis has been volunteering and coordinating with local arts organizations, businesses, and the WVU School of Art and Design to bring more fine art to the Morgantown area and to help develop a strong artist community.
Inspired by the “everyday” objects and materials in our lives, Davis combines a minimalist and post-minimalist aesthetic with nostalgia, empathy, and humor to create sculptures, installations, and prints that focus on materials and form. Davis’s present work explores a variety of mediums and techniques, while allowing the physical characteristics of the materials and objects, combined with considerations of their history, cultural, and personal associations to guide the formation of the pieces.
I am intrigued by the everyday materials and objects that surround us. I notice these overlooked things, and I’m drawn to their physical characteristics, materiality, history, and personal and cultural significance. I hope to present the commonplace objects and materials I use in a way that asks the viewer to examine them more closely; to notice their color, shape, and texture; to consider how those materials change when grouped in multiples, when placed in a different environment or next to other materials; to observe the tiny cracks, rust, or other “imperfections,” in those materials that are evidence of their history.
While I embrace the personal and cultural connections associated with the materials I use, my interest lies primarily in physicality, form, and space. I prefer to the let the materials inform the content of the work rather than impose an idea of my own. I might reinforce certain notions in the way I arrange, combine, or juxtapose, but my decisions are primarily guided by the physical qualities of the materials. At the same time, I cannot deny that many of my decisions are influenced by my own personal history or societal references to a material, and I welcome the fact that viewers will bring their own associations to my work as well. I find the suggestiveness and expressiveness of materials an intriguing concept - an abstract quality of materials that I acknowledge and exploit in my work - while being motivated and guided by the physical.
Current and Upcoming Exhibits
2023 West Virginia Juried Exhibition, Nov. 5, 2023 – Feb. 10, 2024 at the Culture Center, State Capitol Complex in Charleston, WV
Americulture, Opening Feb. 16, 2024, at Galactic Panther, 1303 King St., Alexandria, VA., on the DC metro line
