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.

Jeff Molloy at Winchester Galleries in Oak Bay

The Adventures of JACK PINE

by Jeff Molloy 

OPENING RECEPTION:
Thursday, December 6, 2012  
6 pm – 8 pm (Oak Bay gallery walk evening)

 December 6 - 19, 2012
2260 Oak Bay Avenue

 

Jeff Molloy – May 2011 – Artist of the Month

Jeff Molloy

Fachada Cubana -video

I have been creating art for my entire life. As far back as I can remember, painting and assemblage have been my passions. As a kid I used to make crazy useless little things to amuse myself. Even today I would describe my countless hours in the studio as getting myself in as much trouble as I can and then inventing my way out. Over the years this amusement has produced a wide variety of unique and award winning work .
I am known for my creative use of materials. Typically old blankets, burlap, rusty metal and found objects usually cobbled together on a plywood substrate completed with a healthy portion of plaster and encaustic. For me the material is the message. I find, collect and create every aspect of my work, often taking advantage of preexisting material associations, musical, cultural and historical references. I am enamored by surface textures and the effect of time on different materials. I refer to the area outside my studio as “the field of time”' for it is here that I weather and later harvest aged materials for use in my creations. I pay attention to the time signature on everything that I use to produce my work. These are multidimensional, multi sensory works that bring emotion to the people who experience them, and energy to the spaces they inhabit. My art does not depend on subject or materials alone. It is created through a wide variety of distinctive techniques, tools, and personal processes resulting in instantly recognizable artwork.

Below is a link to the May Focus article by Christine Clark.

http://www.focusonline.ca/sites/default/files/Focus_2011-05_May.pdf

Jeff Molloy and Sampson-Matthews at Winchester Galleries in Oak Bay

Jeff Molloy at Winchester Galleries in Oak Bay.

Jeff Molloy's mixed media renderings of Hudson's Bay blankets are smaller than life-size but larger than life in meaning. They hold the shape and colour of a blanket, but their two dimensional outline imply far more than a warm covering. These blankets are the woolly essence of Canada. They hint of wood smoke and weary trappers, of exploration and exploitation, canoes and commerce, the history of a people and the making of a nation.

They are fabric icons of Canada, part of A Canadian Portrait, an exhibition comprised of mixed media works by Jeff Molloy. They will join his hockey sweaters, Canadian country churches, moose and Prime Ministers sporting everything from lumber jackets to buckskins. With titles such as “Lost in the Woods” and “The Original Six” A Canadian Portrait is a textural exploration of the meaning of Canada, a rendition of warp and woof that has brought the artist first to question and then to embrace his country.

Molloy will also debut his “Canadian Story Boxes”, an ongoing series of interactive mixed media assemblage depicting Canadian stories such as Louis Riel, John McRae (Flanders Fields), The Rocket (Maurice Richard), Billy Bishop and of course the Blanket.

"The Group of Seven made paintings of where we live, not who we are. I want to create work that tells the story of the people, the history, the iconic imagery and the legends that are the fabric of this country" Molloy says. “For the past 15 years I have been working to create art that conjures up the spirit of Canada”.

Molloy has been referred to as a farmer of art. He creates multi-dimensional, multi-sensory works that bring emotion to the people who experience them, and energy to the spaces they inhabit.

Jeff’s art does not depend on subject or materials alone, it is created through a wide variety of distinctive techniques, tools, and personal processes; resulting in truly unique, instantly recognizable Jeff Molloy originals.


Exhibit runs until May 1, 2010    Video