The Architecture of Memory

What at first appears to be an intricate painting but upon close examination slowly reveals itself to be finely cut slivers of paper and wood veneer, hand painted and then laboriously collaged together to create fields of grass, multifaceted rocky cliffs or lush botanical growth.  The architectural structures often incised directly onto wood panels and inserted into these wild landscapes.  In Molnar’s most recent body of work, she continues to construct her paintings with an engineer’s sensibility and rigor, but the architectural structures come from the world of leisure and recreation—and of memory.  The structures and patterns seem borrowed from an earlier generation, and yet also inspired by autobiography.  Her paintings collapse both geography and time.

The artist’s process begins with documentation: Molnar photographs locations newly traveled and well-known and loved.  These photographs are digitally stitched together, combining landscapes with structures from various “memories.” This is the way we experience memories: we confuse the place and time, the structures bleed together, places patched together in our minds the way Molnar collages photographs, like concretized memories.  These are the improbable landscapes of our memory, given physical shape.