Molly Kaderka

Spring 2020 Hera Gallery Exhibition: Silent Presence

www.mollykaderka.com
mollykaderka@gmail.com

My collective body of work as an artist stems from an earnest desire to create beauty and meaning. I find the most compelling way to do this is to use my artistic practice to search for and evoke for my viewers elements of the sublime. To experience the sublime is to simultaneously feel and cognitively understand the serendipity and the insignificance of one’s own existence, and to submit to this experience in the face of something greater and more mysterious. This experience of both feeling and understanding how small we all are is probably unique to humans, but it is not an everyday or universal experience and it can be profoundly transformative.
I am fascinated by the innate human desire to pursue knowledge and understanding and by the processes people go through to find meaning in what they encounter in the natural world. This practice of looking to nature to evoke a sense of the sublime continues to inform my current monoprints/drawings and my new series of paintings, which focus on extinction. As we collectively face the prospect of thousands of plant and animal species going extinct, due largely to human-induced climate change, I am more and more drawn to the question of how people experience, or refuse to experience, the natural world.

Molly Kaderka is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, printmaking, and drawing. Kaderka’s work is inspired by her deep interest in natural phenomena and in human and earth history. As an amateur astronomer and rock enthusiast, her research in Astronomy and Geology has led her to search out and observe moments in the natural world, like the night sky, as well as geological specimens and human artifacts, in order to translate them into compelling visual images.
Molly Kaderka holds a BFA in Painting and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute (2011), and MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (2018). Her work has been shown nationally including solo exhibitions at the Haw Contemporary and Kiosk Gallery in Kansas City and in group shows at Morgan Lehman Gallery, Asya Geisberg Gallery, (NY), Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and Kimball Arts Center (UT), Hiestand Galleries at the University of Miami and Manifest Gallery (OH), The Jones Center at the Austin Museum of Art (TX), Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts (MA), and Newport Museum of Art (RI). She currently has a solo exhibition at the Jamestown Art Center in 2020.
Recent 2019 awards include the Walter Feldman Fellowship issued by Arts and Business Council of Boston, Visual Arts Artist Fellowship Grant issued by the Somerville Arts Council, and Juror’s Prize for Surface exhibition at the Attleboro Museum curated by Neal Walsh .