Molly Reilly is an artist, designer and educator living in Sarasota, FL. She holds a BFA from California College of Art and MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Originally from Buffalo, NY Molly has moved throughout the country teaching, exhibiting and participating in many urban indie art fairs. Her perspective in photography has been on the sequential aspects of imagery, building books and installations inspired by the act of collecting, personal stories and notions of home. Similar themes of travel and mid-century design influence her design work as accessible cultural icons. Molly is the maker/designer behind the indie business Neogranny, a vintage inspired laser-cut wood jewelry and home goods line which has been sold in many retail venues such as the National Museum of Art, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Her artwork has been exhibited nationally and resides in several prominent Art Collections such as Daimler Art Collection and Lilly Library of Indiana University.
Artist Statement:
The act of collecting is the main drive of my work. Objects I find or images I make are recorded and essentially cataloged as a stockpile for me to draw upon. The isolated object or snapshot becomes representative of time; iconic and universal. Images are collected, sorted and stacked. A narrative is contrived.
My work is a series of images composed from an eclectic stockpile of personal photography, thrift store acquisitions, domestic detritus and items scavenged from the estates of the deceased. Found objects representing loss and familiarity are composed within vacant landscapes, sorted into books and expanded into immersive installations. Scanned and stitched together these images are full of seams. This is photography on the inside out, stretched and sustained by its remnants. The process is about looking, not just through the camera lens, but at the massive heap of cultural cast offs; finding connections with the image and the object.