Track 16 presents Los Angeles-based artist Molly Segal in her solo exhibition, What We Whispered and What We Screamed. The show runs through August 5th and is open Wednesday - Saturday, 12pm – 6pm and by appointment.

Wildfires, orgies, tent cities, and whale carcasses are just some of the recurring imagery in this newest body of work by Molly Segal. On display are a series of watercolor paintings ranging in scale from intimate to epic size. Cycles and opposition fascinates the artist: the undercurrent of living and dying, pleasure and destruction, all in coexistence. Delicate, luminous scenes in muted hues depict freeways, empty construction sites, and hills ablaze with wildfire, at times choking the scene with gray smoke.

At the same time, playful figures engage in sexually pleasurable activities–seemingly unaware of the barren landscapes they inhabit. They seem blissfully absorbed in their activities and unbothered by the destruction surrounding them. Figures are often hidden or secondary. In one piece, an exposed whale carcass hides gestural figures in the midst of an orgy, their forms blending into the exposed innards of the rotting whale. Whales continue as a motif, lying among a towering pile of scrap metal or at the base of a circle jerk. Unlikely elements are juxtaposed within the environment, yet human activity affects it all. Tents recur as well; solitary tents sit against a ground of unpainted paper in loneliness and isolation–a landscape familiar to every viewer.

Segal uses a plastic paper as her surface. This technique allows the paint to sit on top of the paper and move freely, allowing a surface both impermanent and exposed during the process. The pigment becomes bolder and more saturated, while leaving the painting itself more vulnerable to the elements. The artist’s work is a quietly confrontational lens into the time we exist in. As she mentions, “we are the richest place on earth at the end of the world.” The environment holds finite resources and, in one sense, the human population is complicit in the destruction. The work is not overly didactic; Segal finds humor in the bleakness, “we're all watching a disaster and jerking off.”

Molly Segal is a Los Angeles-based painter. Born and raised in Oakland, Segal is interested in her home state of California as a site where disaster and decadence converge. Her large scale watercolors explore fragile connections, finite resources, and the price of survival in inhospitable climates. Her paintings have been exhibited at Charlie James Gallery, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Zevitas Marcus Gallery. She was an inaugural artist-in-residence at the Quinn Emanuel Artist Residency in Los Angeles in 2021. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Whitehot Magazine, Artillery, and Lapham’s Quarterly. She received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2013.