Redwood

Pioneer Works presents Redwood, a solo exhibition of new works by artist Molly Lowe, on view March 11 - April 24, 2016.   On Friday March 11, from 7-10 pm, Pioneer Works will host a reception for the exhibition’s opening, which will include will be a screening of Lowe’s first feature film, also titled Redwood (2016, 58 min.), beginning at 8pm. The exhibition and film mark the culmination of a project that  began during Lowe’s residency at Pioneer Works in 2014.  

Exploring notions of immortality, the exhibition Redwood physicalizes Lowe’s new film of the same name (2016, 58 min.), which will be screened continuously during the run of the show.  The film is. a time-travel drama in which we see life through the eyes of a young woman who has received a memory transplant from her grandmother, currently in a vegetative state in a Mnemonegenix Center, suffering from severe dementia.  Following the transplant, the young woman’s experiences and perceptions become fragmented and conflated.  Characters throughout different decades in her grandmother’s life don masks depicting the physical transformation one woman aging, from adolescence to obsolescence.  The masks collapse the young woman’s identity with those of the other female members of her family, making character dynamics and plot lines ambiguous.

In Pioneer Work’s main gallery space, leading into the film’s screening room, Lowe has created a surreal landscape comprised of  a 30-foot, suspended Redwood tree sculpture, a large-scale sand-dune shaped like a breast, and a steep hill with a bed at it’s apex.  These environmental objects serve as totems to the film, extending and physicalizing concepts of memory and surreality explored in the work.  In addition, hand-made masks and gloves from the film are displayed in the screening room as a taxonomy-of-sorts, memorializing the disjointed aging process of characters in the film.  

The majority of the project was filmed inside handmade sets within Pioneer Works’ studio spaces.  Additional scenes were filmed in Northern California.