LOS ANGELES, CA.- DENK gallery is presenting new works by Los Angeles-based artist Donnie Molls in Nation of Consumption. A Southern California native, Molls' labor-intensive practice combines photo-based chemical processes with painting. Merging fine art materials with industrial and automotive ones, Molls engages the Californian art histories of both Finish Fetish and Light and Space while investigating the legacies of Americana and its origins in consumer culture. In Nation of Consumption, Molls examines the legacy of the consumer castaway and the life of the object once it has outlived its use.
A self-taught artist, Molls has developed a mixed-media technique using one of the oldest chemical photo developing processes available. Washing silver gelatin bromide onto panel and canvas to develop negatives directly onto their surfaces, the artist then uses oils and automotive paints to work into the pictorial field, creating different surface qualities. His works are primarily based on site photography he has documented and tend to emphasize desolate, decaying, or ordinary places, finding the unexpected poignancy in their less obvious recesses. Past subjects have included the desert, urban wrecking yards and parking lots, tire piles, vintage cars, and modernist architectures.
Nation of Consumption presents a series of new sculptural works and paintings by Molls which bring found, discarded commercial objects back to life, monumentalizing their remnants and the nostalgia they invoke through a literal process of sculptural transformation. The series began with the disinter-ment of found tires from the 1920s and 1930s that Molls had accidentally excavated on his property. They had been inhumed in the earth in the early Twentieth Century to uphold the precipitously developed terrain of the Hollywood Hills. Dilapidated and gnarled by nearly a century's worth of weight in earth, rock, and sediment, the tires bare the physical evidence of their material histories. Molls pre-serves the contorted rawness of the object's found state, converting its impression to sculpture through aluminum casting and finishing. Alongside these tire sculptures, is also a polished aluminum cast of a1980s boom-box, another nostalgic object reminiscent of the artist's own childhood.
The accompanying paintings in the exhibition explore the dated print advertisements for the same manufactured products the artist has cast in aluminum. Looking to the enduring cultural currency of consumption and its inextricable link to advertising media, Molls explores the appreciable lifespan of the object produced by American consumerism and reveals the permanent nature of the remains produced by an industry systemically driven by impermanence. Taking the two-dimensional format of commercial print media and replicating it within the field of painting, Molls elevates the found graphics through the same restorative gesture used to preserve the material legibility of the sculptures in three-dimensions.
Molls transforms these unremarkable specimens of American consumer culture, treating them as living relics and elevating them through the divestment of their utilitarian origins.
Donnie Molls was born in Redwood City, CA and lives and works in the Hollywood Hills. A self-taught artist, he uses photography and painting to explore consumer culture in California. He has exhibited extensively in LA and has been featured in group exhibitions at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, CA, Lan-caster Museum of Art, CA, Laguna Art Museum, CA, and the Riverside Art Museum, CA. He has par-ticipated in residencies at Kraus Australis, Rotterdam, in the Netherlands (2003/2007), and 7 Degrees, Laguna Beach, CA (2002), and his work appeared in the West Coast Edition of New American Paint-ings in 2006, (No.67)
