Jeff Molloy at Winchester Gallery in Oak Bay

A Simple Life 

  Dec. 3 to 18, 2013

Jeff Molloy is an award-winning Canadian painter, sculptor and assemblage artist.  For the past 20 years, he has worked predominantly in encaustic and mixed media.

His work explores culture through the use of its stereotypes, traits and artifacts.  Over time, these artifacts become a part of our identity, conjuring up deep-rooted associations and memories.
Jeff employs a variety of distinctive techniques, tools, and personal processes that result in truly unique and instantly recognizable work. His creativity shifts and twists in response to his materials.  Beeswax, tar, pigments, remnants of human civilization – each material reacts differently to the tools and techniques he employs.  Carving, painting, sculpting, applying heat and blunt force all contribute to objects that may resemble paintings, yet may just as easily be mechanical and functional in nature.  To Jeff, line is a physical thing, something that is cut and gouged.  His surfaces are built up and scraped away.  He uses homemade tools to draw, paint, carve and burnish his surfaces until the work reflects its own history.

This latest series, A Simple Life, honours our heritage while raising questions about our future.  “We have wandered so far from the land,” Jeff states.  “In a couple of generations we have gone from a relatively simple existence to a life of consumption and disconnection.” 

In May 2012, while driving to Toronto, Jeff explored a Saskatchewan homestead with a descendant of its early settler family.  This once wild prairie, just 30 kilometres outside Val Marie, abuts Grasslands National Park.  It is where heaven meets earth.  A Simple Life was conceived as Jeff wandered the homestead, now a bone yard of old wagons and sleighs laden with rusting hardware, weathered and rotting into the rich soil.  Jeff utilizes this hardware in many of the pieces contained in this body of work.

In the midst of making A Simple Life, Jeff travelled to Cambodia where he photographed more than 300 haystacks.  Jeff says, “Spending time in the Cambodian countryside was like going back in time...in my mind I was on the Canadian prairies a hundred years ago.”

 

OPENING RECEPTION:
Thursday, December 5, 2013  
6 pm – 8 pm (Oak Bay gallery walk evening)

 

2260 Oak Bay Ave.