Molly Kaderka

Lives and works in Winston-Salem, NC

Artist statement

My artistic work employs the genre of landscape to evoke the awe and mystery of the natural world and to inspire viewers to reflect on their own place within it. Through large-scale paintings and murals, I have sought to reimagine the traditional format of the landscape in a way that invites a different encounter with both celestial and terrestrial realms. Traditional landscape paintings rely on the intersection of ground and sky at a horizon line located at some distance from the viewer. This is an entirely illusory framework. Though it reflects our experience, as earthbound creatures, of living within the bounds of the sky and the ground— constantly beneath the one and above the other—it involves a perpetually distorted perspective of both. We sense the ground as flat and solid and static beneath us and the sky as a giant domed ceiling above, yet neither realm actually has those characteristics. The earth, in fact, is curved beneath us and in a constant state of change (as the geological record shows) and the sky is simply our window into the vast universe. In contrast to the linear, human-centered orientation of traditional landscape painting, my work compresses the landscape by eliminating linear perspective and reconfiguring the horizon line into a circular composition, requiring the viewer to focus simultaneously on the ground and the sky and not on the distance between them. This radical shift in perspective creates a kind of immediacy with and a sense of immersion...

Artwork