In her third solo exhibition at pt. 2 Gallery, Los Angeles-based artist Molly Bounds invitations viewers right into a hazy terrain of reminiscence, proof, and misrecognition. Transmissions unfolds like a murky investigation the place private historical past turns into fragmented and instinct sends blended alerts. Bounds makes use of the concept of receiving alerts—radio frequencies, premonitions, visions, and indicators—as a framework for navigating the skinny line between reality and fiction, actuality and projection. Is it protected to be open to “receiving”?
Steeped in ambiance and unease, Bounds’ work characteristic faces turned away or obscured—figures seen by means of a shifting lens—someplace between serenity and suspicion. Shadows stretch throughout home interiors and landscapes alike, warping time and perspective. Drawing from a household historical past of detective work and mysticism, Bounds poses a psychic panorama that feels as very similar to a dreamy hallucination because it does a criminal offense scene.
Sculptural parts operate as a genealogical museum exposing familial strategies of reasoning spanning generations —previous and current totems from a lineage of instinct and spying. A gardening glove solid in iron, grandfather’s binoculars, nanny’s magnifying glass, a dowsing rod: every object holds mythologized significance, pulled from household historical past and speculative fiction alike. These works blur the road between imparted info and fabricated drama, conjuring a case file assembled from half-truths, heirlooms, and imagined threats.
Bounds explores the concept of hyperstition—fictions that change into actual just by being believed—suggesting that worst-case eventualities, as soon as imagined, can form notion, habits, and even actuality itself. In Useless Ringer, a prophecy turns into a robust (and probably harmful) type of creation. A peephole portrait of her sister in a state of ease invitations an air of deviance or hazard. Can merely asking, “what might go improper?” invite turmoil? In A Rock That Says No (Pink Gentle), Bounds references Philip Ok. Dick’s Exegesis—his sprawling, handwritten archive of visions and theories sparked by a revelatory expertise in 1974. The work’s esoteric logic and obsessive element echo all through the exhibition, contributing to a destabilized narrative that flirts with each insanity and revelation, delirium and religious inheritance.
By casting the viewer because the observer—all the time barely eliminated—Bounds levels a quiet type of paranoia: in a world the place genius and psychosis share a line of connection, can a intestine feeling be trusted?
