Molly Springfield

Trace and reproduction are also central themes in Molly Springfield’s media-reflexive works. Drawings by Molly Springfield (*1977 in Columbia, S.C., lives and works in Washington, D.C.) show meticulously rendered photocopies of literary, philosophical, or photo-historical books. The graphite drawings not only depict the text, but also the notes, dog-ears and imperfections left on the pages by the processes of reading and photocopying. In an age of copy and paste Molly Springfield’s drawings invoke the spirit of passed down knowledge.

Through Springfield’s faithfully rendering every letter and every shadow by hand until they become abstract shapes no different from images, the drawings embrace the materiality of language and tie in with positions of conceptual art, but also reference historical discourses about the question of mechanical reproduction and its reverberations in visual art.