NADA Curated: Reduction to Satire (Reductio ad Satura)

Molly Grad is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, working across the mediums of drawing, painting, performance, sculpture, and textiles. Grad is investigating personal, ancestral, and collective trauma, through enacting radical empathy towards its least visible–inanimate objects or live occupants alike. Utilizing multiple platforms, she performs an excavation process into urban cities’ industrial pasts, thus interfering with the vertical axis and inverting social orders as a solution to our current state. Grad’s “Fleeting Street sculpture”, explores the potential of everyday urban landscapes to create site-specific, short-lived experiences utilizing existing structures to create an emergence–a radical change act.

Grad placed a textile cabbage on a walnut plinth in the middle of a homeless shelter’s front yard in North London, thus interacting with its all-male crew of residents and builders. The collision between the participants and an oversized cabbage, formed an absurd chance encounter - an opportunity to create wonder within the mundane in a zone society perceives as an “invisible realm”.