Molly Larkey, Leonardo Bravo, Anne McCaddon

High Line explores the line as independent, idealized objects that, far from being abstract symbols and primitive concepts, are rooted in objective and subjective personal experience—its character and very existence determined by real and imagined forces often working in opposition to each other.

In her new work, Molly Larkey continues her interest in the idea of an alternative “imaginary” language by exploring the very form of language—letters, symbols, words, drawing, writing—as the basis for her sculptural and painted works. For Larkey, this imaginary language is related to being a queer person and imagining a queer utopia, and it can be hinted at or brought closer to ones field of vision and experience through art. The idea of an imaginary language and an imagined queer utopia can be seen in relation to modernism and the utopian ideals around the various modernist movements, which related art and aesthetics to a vision of an alternative form of society. It imagines art as an alternative kind of language with the power to alter our ability to communicate, opening up different ways of apprehending and describing the world, and changing how we behave with oneanother and function in the world. Larkey’s “queer” language of forms, however, proposes a system of signs that does not conform to the mandates of cultural logics, and, particularly, not the didactic, categorical, exclusionary, rigid, male-centric model of modernism and its entailing hierarchies. Her new wall sculptures do that on an individual level—they literally change shape depending on where one is standing in relation to them. Wrapped in linen, painted, and hung on the wall, they are clearly meant to be read as paintings, yet they refuse to be fixed or held down into one category of meaning or signification. They are dynamic and require the viewer to look at them with a dynamic, open frame of mind.

Molly Larkey (b. 1971, Los Angeles) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received a MFA from Rutgers University, New Jersey, and a BA from Columbia University, New York. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at PS1 MoMA, New York; The Saatchi Gallery, London; LACMA, Los Angeles; The Drawing Center, New York; Horton Gallery, New York; Ochi Gallery, Ketschum; Samson Projects, Boston; and Bobbie Greenfield Gallery, Santa Monica, among others.

Leonardo Bravo’s works on paper draw on specific modernist and minimalist geometric forms to depict complex structures and systems that suggest a fluid and constant state of unfolding. Influenced by his upbringing in thepolitically charged climate of his native Chile in the 1970’s and a variety of other sources (including the Bauhaus weavings of Anni Albers and Gunta Stolzl, the wall drawings of Sol Lewitt, the works of Helio Oiticica, and traditional Indian miniatures), Bravo sees these visual structures as reflective of the trajectory or arc in which social movements are formed, operate, disperse, and ultimately collapse.