Molly Knobloch

www.mollyknobloch.com
@mollyknobloch

Molly Knobloch is an artist living in Portland, Maine who explores nonsense, confusion, possibility, and the body through painting and painted sculpture. She grew up in Arlington, Massachusetts with a northern dad and a southern mom and has evenly split her life between the two regions as a result, interrupted by some side quests in France.
Molly studied painting at Tulane University in New Orleans (BA, 2013). She worked as an artist, designer, educator, and administrator for nine years in Austin, Texas before moving to Maine to pursue her master’s at the Maine College of Art & Design (MFA, 2026). In 2021, Molly had her first solo show at Goodluckhavefun, and her first duo show at Contracommon, both in Austin. While working toward her MFA, her work has evolved from mostly painting to include sculpture and installation work, though painting each sculptural object remains a key step in the process.


The intentional abstraction of functional objects highlights the absurdity of the impulse to order our daily lives, while prompting the possibility of unexplored alternatives, and presenting the fertility of sitting in the discomfort of the unknown.
I recreate recognizable and obscure objects, abstracting and personifying them. In this absurd recreation, I break these objects down to their formal elements in order to distort them and experience them in a new way. I draw inspiration from the utilitarian objects and infrastructure I see around me in the city – parking meters, fire hydrants, fire escapes, plastic tags, road signs – and remove their primary utility to give them a new, aesthetic purpose, or lack thereof. Playing with dimension, perception, shape, and surface, these redundancies interrupt the viewer’s expectations and alter how they perceive the world around them.
Looking at these hyper-specific shapes in a new context draws out curiosity, humor, and levity. We can take our everyday surroundings for granted, the symbols we interact with everyday are far from objectively, eternally, or universally legible. Out of context, we see how unique and culturally specific the symbols we take for granted are. Like these objects, our reality is highly subjective. If we can change the way we view a road sign, we can change the way we view ourselves and others, release certainty, and become comfortable holding multiple identities or meanings at once.