Within a Surface explores time as a non-linear experience bridged by a shared world, with photography as a tool to build that bridge. Working with family archives, artist Molly Steels connects with both presence and absence on this earth, blending images of her relatives with natural materials to create surreal, in-between spaces that are both ephemeral and lasting, past and present. By using imagemaking as a method to exist in a non-linear way, Within a Surface is an attempt to battle existential dread with curiosity and wonder. It explores how photography can help us conceptualize mortality and perhaps, on some level, defy it.
Death itself is a non-presence; it cannot be observed, like a shadow is the absence of light. However, photography is intrinsically built from shadows and light, which can give this non-presence a feeling, a space or a fleeting sense of understanding. Within a Surface is a space imagined as a body of water. Cycling through to empty and refill, a consistent backdrop suspending life above and below. The surface, a space of meeting we momentarily slip into, which, like the plane of a photograph, exists in both worlds simultaneously.
Molly Steels is a Toronto-based artist and arts administrator originally from Bradford, Ontario, who holds a BFA in Photography and a minor in Sociology from Toronto Metropolitan University. By worldbuilding in tandem with family archives, Steels blends the past into the present, creating surreal conceptual spaces using photography as a tool for connection across time. Through experiments with materiality, collage, and the treatment of images as objects, she aims to visualize intangible qualities of grief, longing, community and memory—with an emphasis on the nuance within these experiences.
