Resting Place (Appendix, Fallopian Tubes, Uterus, Ovaries, Cervix), 2016, Paint, marker, and graphite on wood panel, each 24 by 18 inches. Photo: Natalie Fleming.

 

Molly Alloy’s Resting Place (Appendix, Fallopian Tubes, Uterus, Ovaries, Cervix) series masks its content in cotton candy-inflected hues and animated brushstrokes. The pink arches—read alongside the title—indicate something much less cheery: death, loss, and trauma. “In the wake of my 2013 hysterectomy,” Alloy writes, “I found that a lifelong wondering had become a certainty—that I have a sexual trauma buried in my pre-memory mind, the impact of which reverberates through my body and self today as it has all my life.” This work, though, resonates further on a political level in 2017 America. On one hand, Alloy asks us to consider what it means to lose these organs that are so deeply connected with our understandings of “woman”? On the other hand, how is trauma felt along axes of gender and sexuality? But a third question Alloy’s work asks is how do politics duplicate, replicate, and perpetuate themselves in personal, bodily experiences of trauma? Resting Place (Appendix, Fallopian Tubes, Uterus, Ovaries, Cervix) confronts all of these.

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Molly Alloy (b. 1981) is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Portland, OR. Molly creates provocative and intimate works which centralize personal and collective experiences of trauma. Locating conceptual and cultural explorations within her own lived experience, she uses the physical reality of the body as a source of learning and point of departure. Her work possesses an optimism rooted in the growth potential of discomfort rather than pacification, and an emotionally charged sense of humor. Born in St. Louis, MO, Molly received a Bachelor of Science in Studio Art from Skidmore College in New York in 2004 and made her home in Portland in 2008. At time of publication she is a Master of Fine Art candidate at Pacific Northwest College of Art. Molly has exhibited nationally in solo and group shows in galleries, barns, alleys, museums and universities.