On View: September 14 – October 26, 2023

Molly Kaderka is an interdisciplinary artist working across printmaking, drawing, and painting. Kaderka’s work is inspired by her deep interest in natural phenomena and in human and earth history. 

Kaderka holds a BFA in Painting and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been shown nationally, including in solo exhibitions at the Haw Contemporary in Kansas City and Jamestown Art Center in Rhode Island, and in group shows at Morgan Lehman Gallery (NYC), Asya Geisberg Gallery (NYC), Attleborough Museum of Art (MA), Newport Art Museum (RI), and Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. Recent awards include the Walter Feldman Fellowship, issued by Arts and Business Council of Boston; Visual Arts Artist Fellowship Grant issued by the Somerville (MA) Arts Council, and Inspiration Grant from Kansas City Artist Alliance. 

Kaderka has taught painting and drawing at Kansas City Art Institute, Maryland Institute College of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting at Oklahoma State University.

Artist Statement

In the exhibition Skywell, artist Molly Kaderka creates an immersive environment through large-scale, site-specific paintings.  Using a combination of printmaking, drawing and painting, these pieces evoke deep time, with rough geological formations unfolding to the limitless universe of stars. Framed by a tactile printed rock surface, the circular compositions act as an aperture to the brilliant night sky.  

The show consists of three works that move the viewer from an experience of dense darkness—layers of heavy rock broken by a few slivers of sky—to an encounter with a nearly overwhelming brightness, as the work evokes the night sky four billion years hence, when the neighboring galaxy of Andromeda is predicted to collide with our own Milky Way. Anchoring the series is a carefully balanced formation of rock-like surfaces encircling a dark sky, the ancient stones opening to the distant, intangible stars.

These dramatic installations leave behind our traditional associations of rock and sky with permanence and stillness, illusions born out of our brief interactions with both. In the nearly unfathomable span of deep time, everything is shifting, spinning, and changing.

The work featured seeks to reimagine the traditional format of landscape painting by removing linear and atmospheric perspective—the meeting of earth and sky at a distant horizon—while still maintaining recognizable elements of both.  This re-thinking of the historical landscape genre stems from a desire to incorporate a more contemporary, science-informed understanding of the natural world and the unseen forces that shape it, and to evoke in the viewer a sense of awe and an experience of the sublime.