An Interview With Molly Larkey

by Christopher Michno

Molly Larkey’s recent exhibition at Ochi Projects, a shape made through its unraveling, reflects her interest in the invisible conceptual structures that shape society and structure ways of thinking. Her sculpture alludes to the ideals of utopian concepts as novel possibilities on a distant horizon, but with this exhibit Larkey also focused on identifying and adopting practices that solve seemingly intractable societal problems.

Larkey programmed four events over the run of the exhibition to initiate conversations about emerging ideas and social and economic structures engaged in generating positive change in the world. These events included discussions on restorative justice as an alternative to the retributive nature of the criminal justice system, with the Red Road Restorative Justice project facilitating Restore: Modeling Alternatives to the Criminal Justice System; emerging ideas about affordable housing and sustainable communities, in Inhabit, led by the Latch Collective and the Los Angeles Eco-Village; the structures of language, featuring artist Amanda Yates Garcia in Articulate; and alternatives to artificial scarcity presented by Jade Gordon who trained with the Theater of the Oppressed, in Connect.

“A Shape Made Through Its Unraveling.” Ceramic pendants, each of which is offered to visitors to take, wear, and keep.

The title piece of her exhibition, “A Shape Made Through Its Unraveling” (2017), is a four by eight feet array of small ceramic tiles that visitors were encouraged to take with them. Each tile, approximately one by one and half inches, has a small hole near the top, where it can be fitted with a cord and worn as a pendant.

In a recent conversation at Ochi Projects, Larkey began by discussing a shape made through its unraveling and the ideas that have been informing her work.

MOLLEY LARKEY: In our current moment, we’re living in a paradigm of scarcity. Almost nobody feels like they have enough, even though it’s clear that some people have more than can possibly be used by anyone in a lifetime. I’m trying to generate an idea around enoughness and a return to the sense of the earth being the source of everything that you need and having a relationship with that.

What if we actually succeed together instead of succeeding against each other and posit that as a different mode of engagement?

I’ve heard it said several times that the distribution systems that Walmart and other global companies use can actually distribute resources in such a way that there would be enough for everybody to live sustainably. That’s [the idea] underlying it [the ceramic piece]. Within the art context, it’s a literal collective ownership of the piece instead of as an individual work. There are works here that are individual works, but this manifests collective ownership.

CHRISTOPHER MICHNO: And that idea is embedded in how people partake of the piece as you encourage them to take a small portion of it away with them. It’s interesting that you’re doing this within the context of a commercial gallery where there is a profit motive.

Installation view

LARKEY: I think that, first of all, everybody is implicated in capitalism. There’s no way to get outside of that system, even if I were [exhibiting] in a non-profit or some other kind of a space.

MICHNO: That act can be read as a critique of the commercial gallery system; but it also seems you don’t intend for it to be read that directly or literally, but rather as a way to begin a conversation of a larger scope.

LARKEY: I think the piece can definitely be read as a critique of the commercial gallery system, though it’s complicated because the show includes objects that are for sale. Since our culture is so entrenched with capitalism, it’s almost impossible to escape participating in capitalistic exchanges. Everyone needs to survive—including artists and gallery owners.

Also, I wanted to do something that not only critiques the commercialism in art, which is plain to see, but points toward a possible alternative. By making a piece that is free and collectively owned, with each person getting a portion, I hoped to highlight the broader mechanics of capitalism as based in accumulation and hoarding of resources, instead of the sharing of resources. Since the mechanics of capitalism are fully manifested in the art world, the piece is a way to illuminate how that mechanism of accumulation functions and also provide a way to participate in something different.

MICHNO: You’re changing a relationship that’s considered essential to the working of the space.

LARKEY: I feel like I’ve been thinking a lot about this myth of the individual, the myth of the “winner takes all” kind of competitive scarcity model, which I think is totally ineffective in the art world. And it follows the same rules as late stage capitalism which is like the aspirational economy. Very few people ever get to the top, but everyone participates in the game because there is the possibility, however remote, that they might make it to the top.

So that is one part of what I’ve been thinking about.

And the second part is that, similar to the capitalistic aspect, the Trump part—and I love using him as an example—his story of being a self-made man is total bullshit. And I think the same is true for artists. There’s actually a huge community and superstructure behind every artist that is successful. There are the people they went to school with, there are their mentors, there are their friends who come into the studio and are like, “I like that, I don’t like that.” And there are the galleries.

I’m not against that, but I feel like the culture erases the actual collective activity of art making.

Let’s look at all these things that actually go into the person who rides at the top and their relationship to the community afterwards.

I’m interested in what it would mean if we brought more focus to the community part.

What if we actually succeed together instead of succeeding against each other and posit that as a different mode of engagement?

Art has a role to play in those [social-political] conversations that is not just illustrative. I think that art can be transformative; at least, for me it is, in shifting my perceptions of things in the world.

It’s funny being in one of the darkest political moments certainly of my lifetime and doing shows that are about recreating social dynamics or building tiny communities or restorative justice or any of these somewhat utopian projects. But this is the time to really think about how to do things differently because what we’re doing is completely failing; that’s why I cite Trump because to me he’s the culmination of a certain kind of logic—how are we reinforcing certain kinds of ideas or relationships in our everyday life.

[Larkey’s “Beginn-ers” series is a new mode of working for the artist. Each piece in this series is made of steel 4 x 4 tubes joined in various configurations and covered in stucco and acrylic paint. She thinks of them as a kind of utopian cinder block. Inside of the tubes of one of the utopian cinder blocks there was a pile of folded pieces of paper. ]

MICHNO: What’s the paper inside of the sculpture?

LARKEY: When I did the take-away piece last January [ceramic chain links were given to visitors at Larkey’s exhibition Free and Not Yet at Dutton in New York], I was speaking to someone, and they said, ‘It would be really cool if you left a space for people to also give something instead of just taking something.’ So that is what I did for this piece. There’s a prompt. People have been writing things and leaving them. And we’re posting them online.

Having an opportunity to give back is as important as [receiving something]—I always forget that part. So it was an attempt to create a balance.

MICHNO: These pieces seem related to the linen covered steel tubing that reference a utopian alphabet.

LARKEY: This body of work is in a lot of ways a continuation of the work that I did two and a half years ago that is based in alphabetic forms or in thinking about what a utopian alphabet would look like—one that can be fixed in space and couldn’t be replicated exactly. The form itself and the three dimensionality of the pieces does that. The stucco vessels, because of the scale and the size of the material, are meant to talk more about structures. So there are four and there are four corners. They are not precisely defining a space, but they do kind of define a space that you move through. And also the theme of the show is invisible structures, like the alphabet, or capitalism, or these things that in fact structure the way we relate to each other and dictate how we move through the world and what we can do.

From the “Beginn-ers” series.

So these [the steel, linen and acrylic works exhibited in a shape made through its unraveling] were on that level but still working with alphabetic forms. When I started making [“Beginn-ers”], I started thinking of them as utopian cinder blocks. In the same way that they can’t, in this form, function as cinder blocks, theoretically they could be fit together to build something differently. So the metaphor is building in a fundamentally different way. They’re building blocks, but they’re utopian in that you can’t really use them right now.

I think of the utopian as a horizon that you move towards. I don’t ever think it’s something that you’re going to realize. That sets the horizon of what you’re moving towards. So even just thinking about what it would mean to build something in a totally different way, with a totally different logic than the way that we build things now. And not just buildings but social structures.

MICHNO: So it signals your larger social-political concerns about how society functions.

LARKEY: For me the two things come together in that way: I think that art has a role to play in those conversations that is not just illustrative. I think that art can be transformative; at least, for me it is, in shifting my perceptions of things in the world. So, yes, I try to bring those things together, and they are together in my mind.

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Christopher Michno is a Los Angeles area art writer and the Associate Editor of Artillery. His work has also appeared in KCET’s Artbound, the LA Weekly, ICON, and numerous other publications. He is also an editor for DoppelHouse Press, an LA based publisher that specializes in art, architecture and the stories of émigrés.