Molly Valentine Dierks
Artist Statement
Within detailed installations that merge the formal languages of technology and
nature, Molly Valentine Dierks explores how we collectively mediate evolving
landscapes of intimacy and connection. Dierks studied Psychology at Dartmouth College (BA, Honors), Sculpture & Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Art & Design at the University of Michigan (MFA). She has participated in exhibitions nationally (NYC, Dallas, Detroit, LA) and internationally (Russia, South Korea). Her work has been a part of public installations in Detroit and Minnesota, and included in exhibitions by the University of Michigan Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthalle Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art, Fort Worth Community Arts Center, and 500X Gallery in Dallas, Texas, and more. Select pieces have been featured in MOCAD’s 'Post Industrial Complex', the University of Michigan's site on digital media artists, the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art's Art Yellow Book, Designboom, Opumo Fashion Magazine, The Jealous Curator, and Peripheral Visions Arts, among others. Molly Valentine Dierks currently lives & works from her art and design studio in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.
STATEMENT
My research process traces threads between interests in technology, ecology, and psychology, woven together with fiction and poetry. Intellectual exploration is complemented by an intuitive, embodied approach to experimentation in my studio. My workspace is organized around a growing collection of found materials, ranging from plastic baubles, to tiny mushrooms, interesting textures,
favorite lyrics. By recombining unlikely materials, I am on a quest...seeking to distill the formal and linguistic qualities of desire, conformity, and love. Memory, experience, and personal relationships are generative fields, coloring the ways I mine and expand the space between notions of function or dys-function. My most recent series takes the form of miniature futuristic ecosystems, tiny installations made from natural and synthetic materials. Benefitting from moments of balance and imbalance, this work explores the disorienting transitional experience of living in global culture–the syncopation of moving between pristine natural environments, 'borderland' ecosystems in liminal urban areas, and the alluring forms and products that characterize technology. Elements in the resultant foreign terrains dance between mechanistic and spontaneous action, physical intimacy and anonymity, nostalgia and machine-like reproducibility...to arrive at the question of how we orient ourselves in a landscape that increasingly merges the synthetic and the natural.
Artist Statement
Within detailed installations that merge the formal languages of technology and
nature, Molly Valentine Dierks explores how we collectively mediate evolving
landscapes of intimacy and connection. Dierks studied Psychology at Dartmouth College (BA, Honors), Sculpture & Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Art & Design at the University of Michigan (MFA). She has participated in exhibitions nationally (NYC, Dallas, Detroit, LA) and internationally (Russia, South Korea). Her work has been a part of public installations in Detroit and Minnesota, and included in exhibitions by the University of Michigan Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthalle Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art, Fort Worth Community Arts Center, and 500X Gallery in Dallas, Texas, and more. Select pieces have been featured in MOCAD’s 'Post Industrial Complex', the University of Michigan's site on digital media artists, the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art's Art Yellow Book, Designboom, Opumo Fashion Magazine, The Jealous Curator, and Peripheral Visions Arts, among others. Molly Valentine Dierks currently lives & works from her art and design studio in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.
STATEMENT
My research process traces threads between interests in technology, ecology, and psychology, woven together with fiction and poetry. Intellectual exploration is complemented by an intuitive, embodied approach to experimentation in my studio. My workspace is organized around a growing collection of found materials, ranging from plastic baubles, to tiny mushrooms, interesting textures,
favorite lyrics. By recombining unlikely materials, I am on a quest...seeking to distill the formal and linguistic qualities of desire, conformity, and love. Memory, experience, and personal relationships are generative fields, coloring the ways I mine and expand the space between notions of function or dys-function. My most recent series takes the form of miniature futuristic ecosystems, tiny installations made from natural and synthetic materials. Benefitting from moments of balance and imbalance, this work explores the disorienting transitional experience of living in global culture–the syncopation of moving between pristine natural environments, 'borderland' ecosystems in liminal urban areas, and the alluring forms and products that characterize technology. Elements in the resultant foreign terrains dance between mechanistic and spontaneous action, physical intimacy and anonymity, nostalgia and machine-like reproducibility...to arrive at the question of how we orient ourselves in a landscape that increasingly merges the synthetic and the natural.
