Molly Gochman

“I believe all art is time-based. Works of art document moments in time. They represent time spent by the artist in thought and action, and they’re experienced by an audience in time. Time and change are inexorably connected, and transformation over time is of great interest to me.

My art is less about self-expression than it is about an invitation to participate in a process of thought. I contemplate subjects that are of special importance to me – concepts like value, love relationships, and balance. I follow a path in my thinking that can almost be obsessive at times… progressively zeroing in on the essence of things. It’s a form of meditation, really. Sometimes I chart relationships between ideas, fine-tuning and deconstructing them until eventually, hopefully, I arrive at a conceptual place that feels “elemental.” It’s a tangible, physical sensation actually – a feeling of calmness and quiet. My work is about transforming that sensation into a work that can be experienced by others.

We overlook so much in the world, and I want to encourage people to stop, soften and really feel the meaning that exists in objects that surround us. I’m particularly interested in how objects bear the marks of time… the way a deteriorating photo communicates its history, the way a chair with no legs speaks of what is missing and what remains. These are the marks of life – experience made tangible.

I tend to work with familiar materials – like makeup, bed sheets, grass, clothing, old photos – objects familiar to me and familiar to others. Taking a familiar object and placing it in a new context is transformative. It activates something in the mind, creating new connections between the object, its environment, and us. For example, there is an enormous empty frame lying on a concrete floor. What does it frame? There is a word in Braille, but it’s spelled using huge mounds of grass and soil. What does it say, and who’s doing the saying? This transformation infuses the objects with tremendous symbolic meaning, unique to each individual viewer. But what’s of great interest to me is that the symbol is also a real, tangible, familiar thing. This experience (and it is the experience that interests me more than the object) can awaken us to the fact that the world resonates – even in its most commonplace, familiar corners – with movement, with time, and with meaning.

I hope that the person who experiences my work feels welcomed to go from the work into his or her own contemplation of what the work inspires in them. In a sense, the works are only half-done when I complete my work on them. They are invitations to experience, and it’s up to each person who comes into contact with them to decide how – or if – to accept that invitation.”