(Press Release Date: 9 Mar 10)

Tom Molloy
Aftermath

For more than a decade, Molloy’s practice has revolved around politics, history, war, and justice, around morality and mortality. His new works delve deeper into these subjects, their intersections, and our own complicity in them.

Atlas, the centrepiece of Tom Molloy’s new exhibition, takes its titular book as raw material, and at face value. To make it, the artist disassembled a regular atlas and pinned the loose pages to the wall in the approximate positions the represented land masses would have on a map of the entire globe. Strange things result from this exercise: North America dwarfs its southern neighbour; Russia, split amongst many sheets, has huge gaps in its middle; Britain appears about the same size as the entire continent of Africa. Such distortions, while not unlike those that occur in any flat projection of a spheroidal surface, speak volumes about how the makers of this particular atlas view the Earth and value its various parts—views and values almost certainly shared by most viewers of Molloy’s show. With a simple and economical gesture, Molloy makes visually manifest truths about how the world works that we usually sweep under the rug—when we acknowledge them at all.

The drawing Aftermath shows us an awful image. A man carries the broken body of a child, presumably from a scene of carnage. Such pictures have become commonplace in the news of late, usually coming from the Middle East; lately, with the recent Israeli offensive in Gaza, they have tended to show Palestinians. But whether the adults pictured are policemen, soldiers, or panic-stricken fathers, the injured, maimed, and killed children remain the constant in this terrible genre. Molloy has made a series of drawings from these photographs, creating a visual litany of what the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero has dubbed “horrorism,” but instead of rendering the bodies of the children in them, he has left those areas of the images blank. They become ghostly absences, voids in just the same way they are in the calculations that led to the events that felled them. Molloy’s subtle alterations of received information make us consider the conveniently forgotten underpinnings of so much suffering.

In Standard, a dark slab of limestone has been incised with letters and numbers. Rather than spelling out an inscription, however, the characters stay tidily in alphabetical and numerical order. They comprise nothing more than a guide, in this case the standard font and format used to carve headstones for Irish soldier’s graves. Here, Molloy asks us to contemplate death, soldiers’ deaths in particular, and what causes might be served by keeping them tidy and regimented. The template of Standard also constitutes a means for readily producing tombstones in unending multiples, a fact that, in itself, should give us pause, if only to re-evaluate our continuous professions of desiring an end to bloodshed.

For more than a decade, Molloy’s practice has revolved around politics, history, war, and justice, around morality and mortality. His new works delve deeper into these subjects, their intersections, and our own complicity in them. With an economy of means, Molloy subjects familiar pieties to the acid test of veracity, but the real focus of his epistemological investigations may be our own carefully cultivated denial of truth.

Tom Molloy was born in Waterford, Ireland, and now lives in County Clare, where he is Head of Painting at the Burren College of Art. He attended The National College of Art & Design in Dublin, earning his B.A. in Fine Art in 1987 and his M.A. in Fine Art in 1992. A survey exhibition of his work was held at the Limerick City Gallery of Art in 2005 and at the Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, County Meath, in 2008. Molloy currently has a major exhibition at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in USA (until June 2010 | www.aldrichart.org). Tom Molloy is included in the permanent collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art; The Blanton Museum of Art, Texas; The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon, Dublin; The Zabludowicz Collection, London; Fondazione Spinola Banna Per L’Arte, Turin; FRAC-Piemonte; and Princeton University Art Museum.