Gregg Mizuta

Mollie Hosmer-Dillard's "The Nature of the Abstract" art talk at Surel's Place, Garden City, Idaho on January 31, 2020.

Mollie Hosmer-Dillard in front of her "Darkness on the Face of the Deep" panel installation.

Artist-In-Resident Mollie Hosmer-Dillard has created a series of collages from her own photos of nature, and then used those to produce abstract paintings on panel based on those collages. This way of working allows her to draw from her own solitary experience of nature, even around Surel's Place, and play with compositions that are resonant and whole, and yet also surprising and startling.

During her artist talk, Ms. Hosmer-Dillard showed a progression of her paintings over the last few years and discuss the process of abstraction, specifically how research with books and materials transformed her work from representational ink paintings to large abstract pieces.

Mollie Hosmer-Dillard grew up in central Missouri and holds a bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College and a master’s degree from Indiana University. After attending college she lived in Berlin, Germany for four years. Since then, travel has become a vital aspect of her work in that it inevitably reveals cultural assumptions that normally remain invisible.

Ms. Hosmer-Dillard incorporates that experience into her abstractions from nature. Her large-scale, layered paintings use repetitive mark making to explore how repeated individual thoughts and actions become the building blocks for habits, personalities, customs, and whole societies. Individual marks on the surface of the painting add up to a larger motif visible at a distance.

In this way, her paintings make visible the psychological moment many of us in the industrialized world are now facing with regard to our relationship with nature. This is the moment when the long chain of cause and effect reveals itself, the moment our latent assumptions begin to flash before our eyes.