Molly Briggs

New Paintings

"Fabula North Avenue panels #6 and #7"

Chicago landscapes are presented in these new paintings with an awareness of the landscape as a screen, a locus of human fantasy and psychological projection. The landscape becomes a metaphor for artistic practice, that utopia wherein one would find the time, resources and impulse with which to make art.

Fabula, both a noun and a verb, is Latin for “story”.  It is also the root of the word “confabulate”, which means to fill in gaps in one’s knowledge with fabricated information that one believes to be true.  Fabula: North Avenue is a project that began with the notion of composing a landscape depicting the whole length of North Avenue in Chicago, from Harlem to the Lakefront, by representing one tree per block. The trees were painted from photographic projections.  Initially presented as one 30-foot work, the panels have been reconfigured to stand alone and in smaller groupings.  Subsequent works in the Fabula series have been drawn from other phenomena observed along North Avenue.

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“Although they [utopias] have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up … countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical … This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula.” - Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, Vintage, 1973, p. xviii

“All our landscapes, from the city park to the mountain hike, are imprinted with our tenacious, inescapable obsessions.”  --Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, 1995.

2006

2004

2002